Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Balls: Given those comments, I am not sure whether "off-centre" means lurching to the left or to the right, but I will not comment on the individual case of a sponsor. It is of course extremely important that the consultation is done properly. I am pleased that more than half of our universities are now coming forward as sponsors of academies. It is very important to forge a consensus in the governing body, in the school and among parents as to the way forward. The important thing to say, though, is that academies are delivering results faster than average, often in the poorest communities, so they provide real opportunities for young people in our country.

Edward Balls: The fact that the rise in results over the past 12 months was so dramatic shows that our education reforms are working. Bristol Brunel academy has a fabulous new building and great leadership. The teaching staff are really onside for it, and the results speak for themselves. We want to have more academies like Brunel around the country. I look at it and am proud about what a Labour Government are delivering in Bristol.

Jim Knight: I would be happy to proceed on the issue on a cross-party basis, and I would be delighted to meet with the hon. Lady this week if she would like to discuss where we might end up with our review. She is right that it is important that we have strong relationship education as well as sex education. It is important that we have listened to the voices of young people. That is why I co-chaired the review with a member of the UK Youth Parliament, which did such useful work in its survey of more than 20,000 young people.

Edward Balls: This subject has been close to my work and that of many other Members in recent months. I am sure that Members in all parts of the House will wish to send their condolences and sympathies to the parents of Adrian Sudbury, who sadly died in August. He had campaigned for more information and support in schools in regard to blood and bone marrow transplants. The memorial service for Adrian is on Friday, and I shall be meeting his parents tomorrow.
	As part of the commitment that I made to Adrian in August, I said that the Secretary of State for Health and I would write to all secondary schools to ensure that they had information about the Give and Let Live programme, and also that we would update the pack of material that goes to secondary schools to encourage more young people to become donors. I know that the hon. Gentleman himself has campaigned on this issue for a number of years. The research commissioned by the Jeanette Crizzle trust was conducted before the mailings in September, and revealed that the majority of schools surveyed were not aware of the details of the material.
	We will push hard to ensure that all schools publicise the importance of the Give and Let Live campaign, and the importance of young people becoming donors through their curriculum and in other ways through their schools. We will do so informed by that research. As I have said, tomorrow I will be talking to Adrian Sudbury's parents about how we can proceed with the campaign even after his death.

David Taylor: The Office for Standards in Education has found on a number of occasions that Blackfordby St. Margaret's Church of England primary school in north-west Leicestershire is a good school with outstanding features and is popular with the local community that it serves. As a result, it is bulging at the seams. Can the Secretary of State discuss with me why the standards and diversity fund bid from that school to undertake major capital works that are highly desirable has been bounced back? It seems to fit the bill as a successful and popular school, particularly in relation to the restoration of the primary age range. I would like to have an opportunity to see either the Secretary of State or the Schools Minister as urgently as possible.

Alistair Darling: With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement on this morning's announcement about the implementation of the proposals that I announced to the House last week. Again, I hope that the House will understand that it was necessary for me to issue a market notice this morning ahead of the opening of the markets.
	In my statement to the House last Wednesday, I outlined the principles of the Government's proposals to restore confidence in the banking system and put banks on a stronger footing, which are essential steps in helping the people and businesses of the country and supporting the economy as a whole. Since then, there have been intensive discussions with UK banks and institutions, and I can today tell the House how the principles set out last Wednesday are now being applied.
	I shall first remind the House of the three key elements of the measures that I outlined last week: first, to inject sufficient liquidity into the financial system now; secondly, to make available at least £50 billion of capital, should it be required, to recapitalise the UK banking system, and thirdly, to provide a guarantee on eligible new debt to support medium-term lending between banks. Those measures are aimed at unblocking the inter-bank lending system and strengthening UK institutions, so that banks can start lending to people again. That is necessary both to stabilise the banking system and to support the wider economy.
	No country alone can solve this global problem. At the weekend, at both the G7 Finance Ministers meeting and the International Monetary Fund, it was clear that the three elements of last week's proposals will be essential parts of a global recovery plan. Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had discussions with European Union leaders, and they too agreed that this was the right way to stabilise and rebuild the banking system. Today—indeed, in the last hour or so—many European Union Governments have announced how they plan to support their financial systems. It is increasingly clear that the measures that I am announcing today form the basis of an international consensus on the right response to events.
	I shall set out to the House the detail of today's announcement, which covers both liquidity and capital. I turn first to the funding of the banking system, or liquidity. The Bank of England will continue to supply sufficient short-term funds, which from today will include unlimited dollar funds available to banks to be swapped for sterling funds, and continued loan operations through the special liquidity scheme.
	Additionally, I have announced today the details of the Government guarantee scheme for new lending between banks, an essential part of banks' resuming lending to people and businesses. The guarantee under the scheme will be provided by Her Majesty's Treasury directly. It will be temporary, covering new lending issued during a six-month period, but that period is renewable. It will be priced on commercial terms, which can be varied at the Treasury's discretion but will initially be set at a premium of 50 basis points above the recent average cost of default insurance for each of the participating banks. In other words, it is risk based.
	The guarantee scheme will be available only to those banks and institutions that participate in the Government's recapitalisation scheme, as I made clear last week. The banks taking part in the scheme are given the option of raising capital in the open market, in the usual way, or through the Government's bank reconstruction scheme. When raising capital through the reconstruction fund, the participating banks receive an investment from the Government in return for shares.
	Let me outline, in turn, the position of each of the eight major UK banks and building societies that agreed to the recapitalisation proposals last week. Santander has agreed to transfer £1 billion of capital to its UK operations. Barclays will raise more than £10 billion by next spring through a combination of preference and ordinary shares raised from private sources and other measures. HSBC announced last Friday that it will raise £750 million of new capital for its UK operation in the open market. Standard Chartered has announced that it has already met its agreed capital requirements, and Nationwide building society has announced that it will increase its capital base by £500 million.
	Let me now outline how HBOS, Lloyds TSB and RBS will be recapitalised through the bank reconstruction fund. Subject to take-up by existing shareholders, the Government will take significant shareholdings in these banks—in one case, a majority stake—and in line with normal commercial practices, the Government, on behalf of taxpayers, will have appropriate representation on their boards. These shareholdings will be managed on a fully commercial basis by an arm's length body with a precisely defined remit to act in the interests of taxpayers. Government support in respect of these three banks is tied to conditions covering executive pay and dividend policies, and conditions have also been agreed with them on the level of lending to small businesses and home buyers. We are making it clear that there will need to be a strong focus at these recapitalised banks on making available lending for small businesses and home buyers. These conditions are set out in the individual agreements with the banks, copies of which will be placed in the Library.
	In the case of Lloyds TSB and HBOS, the Government will purchase both ordinary and preference shares once the merger is complete. HBOS will receive up to an £8.5 billion investment in newly issued ordinary shares on completion of the merger. The Government will also invest up to £4.5 billion in newly issued ordinary shares of Lloyds TSB at completion. At the same time, we will invest up to an additional £4 billion in preference shares in the merged institution, with £3 billion of which being invested in HBOS and £1 billion in Lloyds TSB. In return for this investment, which potentially represents around 44 per cent. of the proposed merged bank, the Government will appoint two independent board members. No cash bonuses will be paid to any board member this year. Directors in HBOS will be asked to relinquish their rights to bonuses, and directors in Lloyds TSB will receive restricted stock instead of cash for any 2008 bonus entitlements. The availability of lending to home owners and small businesses will be maintained at at least 2007 levels, and greater support will be given to people experiencing difficulties with their mortgage payments to help them stay in their homes.
	For RBS, the Government will take up to £15 billion of ordinary shares and £5 billion of preference shares. This potentially represents a 63 per cent. interest in the bank, in return for which the Government will appoint three independent board members. Again, no bonus will be awarded to any board member this year, and any bonus paid next year will be in stock and linked to long-term growth in the bank. Mortgage and small and medium-sized business lending availability will be maintained at 2007 levels for the benefit of people up and down the country. These steps will help to put RBS on a stronger footing and allow it to build on its core retail banking operation.
	These announcements represent a total recapitalisation of just under £50 billion for the eight major banks, in line with my announcement last Wednesday, and, as I said then, more capital is available to smaller institutions should they need it. The Government do not want to run Britain's banks—we want to rebuild them. The long-term future of UK banks lies in the private sector, and we will aim to sell the public share in the participating banks as soon as is feasibly possible, but our objective today is to stabilise and rebuild, and we will maintain our stake for as long as it takes to do that.
	I want to say a few words about the Icelandic banks. I met the Icelandic Finance Minister in Washington at the weekend, and I made it very clear that it is imperative that we work together to resolve the position of creditors in this country. Our authorities have set up an arrangement, agreed in principle, for an accelerated pay-out to depositors, and we are also working with the Icelandic authorities to facilitate claims by UK charities and local authorities on their deposits held at these Icelandic banks. In addition, the Bank of England is today providing a short-term secured loan of up to £100 million to Landsbanki, to help maximise returns to UK creditors.
	All the operations of the bank reconstruction fund will give the Government a capital stake—an investment—so that money we borrow is exchanged for valuable assets, and because some of these shares are purchased on preferential terms the Government are better protected and get a better return. The Government guarantee to support new lending between banks will be charged on full commercial terms, ensuring that the taxpayer is appropriately rewarded. The injections of liquidity through the special liquidity scheme and other operations simply allow banks to swap securities with the Bank of England, so that the risk remains with the banks and not the taxpayer—in other words, we get the money back. So, any additional borrowing and debt incurred by the Government as a result of these proposals will be in return for assets, charged at commercial rates or in the form of a temporary loan to the banks. Therefore, as with the temporary nationalisation of Northern Rock, the most appropriate measures of Government borrowing and debt to judge the position of the public finances will be those that exclude the Government's stake in the banking sector.
	The principles that I announced last week are now being adopted across the major world economies, and it is essential that Governments work together, decisively and quickly, to stabilise the system today and to take action to prevent these problems from happening again in future. That is why we must work together to improve international supervision. Tomorrow, the House will debate the Second Reading of the Banking Bill, which is a further step towards making our system more robust.
	Today's announcement is necessary, and it is a significant step towards restoring confidence in the banking system and making it resilient in future. These proposals fully respect the rights of existing shareholders, and, despite current market conditions, the UK banking sector can have confidence about its future. These are very turbulent times in financial markets, but I believe that these measures are essential to stabilise the financial system and help the UK economy. We are committed to doing whatever it takes to stabilise the banking system, protect savers and taxpayers and support the wider economy, and I commend this statement to the House.

George Osborne: I want to know why the Chancellor did not agree with himself a week ago.
	I welcome the statement that senior bank executives will not get cash bonuses. Last week, the Prime Minister dismissed that suggestion when it was made by the Leader of the Opposition, and he now appears to agree with it.
	May I press the Chancellor on the bonuses paid in stock that he talked about? I suspect that that will be an important matter of debate in the coming year. Given that two thirds of the bonuses paid to the RBS chief executive last year were in shares, not in cash, will that arrangement still be possible under the terms that the Chancellor has set out?
	As we said last week, the purpose of rescuing the banks is rescuing the economy. That means extending small business loans and getting families the remortgages they need, but it must not mean a return to irresponsible lending. The Chancellor did not say much in his statement about the lending conditions, but he said this morning that the banks have agreed to keep the availability of loans to homeowners and small businesses at 2007 levels. What exactly does he mean by "availability" in that context, given that the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a statement today saying that it was going to accelerate the de-leveraging? The Council of Mortgage Lenders has also said today that a return to 2007 levels would be neither "prudent or desirable".
	Finally, has the Chancellor had time to reflect on how a decade of Government economic policies has led us into this massive bail out? The Prime Minister said today that, in future,
	"you have got to lay aside more for the possibility that there will be contraction."
	Is that another way of saying that he should have fixed the roof when the sun was shining? Is the Chancellor being straight with people about the potential risks to the public purse? He says that in effect he wants to suspend the borrowing rules and fiddle the figures so that these huge additional debts are not counted on the balance sheet. What sort of example does that set the rest of the economy? Will the Office for National Statistics agree with his decision not to count that as national debt?
	The chairman of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, gave us his candid views on the lunchtime news today, saying that
	"many lessons have to be learned over what has gone on in the last ten years...we probably allowed a boom to go on for too long."
	Britain knows exactly who is to blame for that. We will support today's actions because, faced with the collapse of the banking system, the Government had no other option. However, this is no moment of triumph for the Government, because the British people have now been landed with the bill for the boom that turned to bust.

Alistair Darling: I notice that the shadow Chancellor is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his stance of bipartisanship. In the course of the last year, I have noticed that he finds it impossible to avoid quickly getting into a situation where he seems more concerned with scoring points than with addressing what I think is quite a serious matter.
	The hon. Gentleman asked a number of questions, which I would like to answer. His first point was about the cost, and he appeared to be critical of the fact that we are making available substantial funds, although he accepts that that is necessary. A person either supports such a scheme or does not, and should do it properly, not in half measures. Indeed, if people have learned anything over the past year, it is that action should be taken decisively and quickly to ensure that the banks are properly capitalised.
	The hon. Gentleman also asked about the accounting. I said that accounting is a matter for the ONS—Northern Rock is classified with the public sector and the ONS will make its judgment in relation to RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB. It would be ludicrous, in reaching a judgment about the Government's fiscal position, to say that having to take such action with banks would distort decisions made about the economy in general. I would have thought that most people accept that as a sensible thing.
	The hon. Gentleman asked a couple of technical questions about preference and ordinary shares, and I would have thought that he is aware of this. I said last week that we wanted to take preference shares to secure the Government's interest and I also said that we would be prepared to take ordinary shares. Given the scale of what is necessary—particularly in relation to RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB—the balance has to be struck in a way that is workable. The advantage of preference shares is that we are repaid first, but if too many preference shares were put into an organisation it would impede its ability to get through this period and recover, so, acting on proper advice, we have sought the right balance between preference shares and ordinary shares.
	In relation to ordinary shares, we will get a dividend when dividends are payable, and when we sell our shares the money will come back to the taxpayer. We have put in place a perfectly sensible way of restructuring the banks because our objective is to help them get through this difficult period and in due course sell on the shares.
	In relation to bonuses, yes, some board members and, indeed, other members of staff are paid in shares. I would have thought that the shadow Chancellor welcomes that because anything that ties the interests of senior management to the long-term health of a company must be a good thing. Indeed, we are trying to stop irresponsible remuneration, whereby people are encouraged to do something that damages the banks and, therefore, the rest of the financial system. What we are suggesting means that in future the rewards will be tied to the long-term interests of the bank.
	The hon. Gentleman asked about lending. I said today, and I said in the statement, that we want the availability of lending to be the same as it was in 2007, but of course that applies only to two particular institutions—RBS and Lloyds TSB-HBOS—because they are the only two using the bank reconstruction fund. That is where the conditionality attaches. We said that availability levels need to be the same, but it will of course be up to those banks to judge each application for a loan on its merits. We do not want to return to the irresponsible problems and difficulties we have had in the past.
	The Council of Mortgage Lenders put out a statement earlier today in which it had clearly misunderstood the position, but I understand that it is now correcting what it said in the light of what is actually the case rather than what it imagined was the case. The hon. Gentleman might like to follow that course of action on occasion, as well. However, I, too, am anxious to maintain the bipartisan approach that has worked with at least some success over the past few weeks. I think that the House and the wider country will recognise that, although it is difficult at times for people fully to understand what is going on, they understand that we had to take action, and that we had to do so decisively and in sufficient measure to make it work. There is more turbulence along the way, I am sure, but I believe that the measure is significant; it is a necessary measure and it will be seen not just in this country but across the world as entirely the right thing to do.

Vincent Cable: Last week, from the Liberal Democrat Benches, I indicated our support for the broad outlines of the Government's approach. I particularly welcome what the Chancellor said about small business lending, stemming repossessions and bonuses.
	I share some of the concerns of the Conservative spokesman, which the Chancellor has partly answered, about the commitment to 2007 lending, even if it applies only to those three banks. It was the case that 2007 was the very peak of irresponsible lending, when mortgage lending was fuelling the unsustainable boom in house prices, and it clearly cannot continue.
	I welcome the Chancellor's modesty about the Government's ability to manage banks, but bankers were not very good at managing banks either, so now that Stalin in No. 10 has rediscovered his confidence I wonder whether this might be the time for a Beria in No. 11 to launch a purge of irresponsible bankers. The Chancellor might want to draft in some of the experienced, mutually governed building societies, which have not been seduced by the bright lights and profits of the City, to run some of those banking institutions.
	I welcome the return of sanity and co-operation among the developed countries after the chaos of last week and the beggar my neighbour policies they were starting to pursue. Now that the Government have demonstrated their influence with eurozone Finance Ministers, how will that influence be sustained, as the Chancellor is not a regular member of that group?
	In relation to the Group of Seven, why are the Chinese not involved, given that they are absolutely central to the issue, both as lenders of last resort to the United States and as a main source of growth? Were they not invited, or did they decline the invitation?
	Finally, I hope and suspect that we are in the darkest hour before the dawn, as regards this crisis, but I hope that the Government will not be carried along, as they have been before, by hubris and excessive self-confidence, and that they will recognise that we are entering a period of recession. There must be as much sensitivity to the needs of the large numbers of people who will be hurt by it as has been shown to the banks in recent days.

Alistair Darling: I agree with my right hon. Friend. It is important, on such an issue, and at a time like this, that we work together, both inside in the Chamber and with everyone who has an interest in making sure that we get through an unprecedented period of instability. I also agree with him that it is important that the Government continue to work with people outside the House. Importantly, as many Members have said, we should remember first and foremost why we are doing so—to help the people and the businesses of this country.

Paul Farrelly: I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the action he has taken today. May I remind him of the old adage that when times are good, investment bankers take too much out, and when times are bad, they put absolutely nothing back in? One example is that of Mr. Bob Diamond, who heads Barclays investment banking division. He took £6.5 million as a performance bonus in cash last year, and more than £11 million in shares. I used to work for Barclays bank; it is not taking taxpayers' support today but may do so in future. It has also bought Lehman Brothers and a ring-fenced bonus pool on Wall street. Could I therefore ask the Chancellor to make sure that where bankers have taken out huge bonuses, they are encouraged to put them back in as fund-raising, as an example to ordinary shareholders and the taxpayer? On the example of Barclays, would he agree that it would be obscene to pay out huge bonuses on Wall street when it has cancelled a £2 billion dividend that would have gone into the pension funds of many ordinary people?

Alistair Darling: The problems to which my right hon. Friend refers need to be addressed by the regulatory system, but it is regulatory reform that will do that, rather than the role of the individual directors of two banks. I agree with him, however, that there are many issues that need to be addressed.

Caroline Flint: I will come to Belarus later in my speech. I will deal with that point then, if I may.
	As I said, the prospect of enlargement is a powerful incentive. Turkey is making progress. The death penalty has been abolished. Access to Kurdish language media has improved, including programming by the state broadcaster. Concerns over freedom of expression have started to be addressed by reform of the penal code. A zero tolerance approach to torture has been adopted,. The number of women in the Turkish Parliament doubled in the 2007 elections. Thanks to EU pressure, the victims of Srebrenica have finally seen Radovan Karadzic arrive in The Hague, with the UK at the forefront of those who called for progress on accession to be linked to co-operation with the international tribunal.
	Of course challenges remain in the Balkans and in Turkey. In Turkey, the EU has made it clear that reforms are still needed to consolidate progress on basic freedoms such as freedom of expression as well as minority, ethnic and religious rights, but those issues will be addressed because those Governments know that there is a real prospect of EU membership.

Caroline Flint: I commend my hon. Friend on the work she has done in relation to forced marriages and crimes of honour. I am keen to look at all these areas in my post as Minister for Europe, and also to address them with my other colleagues who work in these important areas. There are different examples of progress having been made, such as the understanding by our postings overseas of how important these issues are. As well as looking to domestic policy, we must look at our opportunities on the global stage to deal with such actions, which go against the basic human rights that women in particular should have access to.
	In July, the EU launched an initiative for a union of the Mediterranean to strengthen our support for reform in the region, and last month the European Council recognised that, in response to recent events, the EU needed to step up its relations with our eastern neighbours. Throughout the region, people share our values and aspire to our model of democracy. Ukraine is making the fastest progress. The traditions of democracy are building strong roots with every election. As the Foreign Secretary set out in August in Kiev, we believe Ukraine should be able to become a full member of the EU when it meets the criteria, but we also need to embed, outside elections, democratic processes in the fullest sense.
	This autumn, the Commission will make recommendations for a new eastern partnership. We want that to be ambitious and to recognise the European aspirations of our neighbours, and to strengthen our practical support for democratic and economic reform. These actions are a sign that the EU is becoming less preoccupied with its own structures and more interested in the outside world—a stance the UK has shaped and supported.
	The EU is also supporting new democracies and helping to construct civil societies in countries that have little tradition of dialogue. In Georgia, EU monitors have deployed to support the peace agreement, and the Russian troops have moved back. Many EU missions help develop the rule of law, which is vital for sustainable security and economic growth. In Kosovo, the EU has more than 2,000 experts working with local police, customs and justice professionals.
	The neighbourhood is the first step, but not the only one. The EU's foreign policy is what we can make it. For example, in the past year we have pushed the EU to take strong stances against the repressive regimes in Zimbabwe and Burma. I want it to be more decisive, able to act more quickly and more proactive in spotting potential human rights concerns before they become full-scale problems.
	Of course, we should not forget the impact that the EU can have on the world's development through trade. The crippling slowness of the Doha round is preventing many of the world's citizens from gaining access to global markets and the benefits that that can bring their development. The EU, the world's largest trading bloc, must push to break the deadlock and secure an ambitious outcome to the talks.
	The EU has at its heart a commitment to democracy and human rights. I hope that we will have the scope and opportunity in the House and in Brussels to debate the EU's role as a champion of human rights and to encourage stronger action in that direction. However, the EU is not the only international organisation. The 60th anniversary of the United Nations declaration of human rights will take place in December. It is a reminder that some values and aspirations are universal and that states can come together and agree a set of common standards. Those standards, in turn, have been codified into a series of legally binding obligations. "Obligation" is a serious word, meaning something more than an aim or aspiration. The older UN texts, such as the convention on torture and the international human rights covenants, and the newer texts are binding on the states that have ratified them. That means that all of us, the UK included, must respect them.
	Of course, it is tempting to set out in this debate the large raft of legislation flowing from our international commitments that is before us in the UK at any one time, but this is a debate on foreign policy so I shall stick to the rest of the world. Another hugely significant aspect of the legal framework set out in the UN and other places is that it opens each of us to the scrutiny of other states party to the treaties. Without that scrutiny, the many pages of promises would be worthless. We in the UK support more action to monitor countries' performance on human rights, for example in the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly. Unfortunately, that work can be undermined if it is seen simply as a process of recrimination and of putting country X in the dock. Sometimes that may be necessary, but rarely. The vast bulk of countries, the UK included, benefit from discussion about the merits of their domestic legislation and, importantly, their actions.

Caroline Flint: We are a positive and strong supporter of the court and we would seek in whatever ways we can to support the implementation of its powers, but where we can we do raise in different ways with different countries issues associated with human rights and individuals. This is about making sure that these institutions work for the purposes they were set up for, but I am happy to look into the point that the right hon. Gentleman has made in order to see what else we are doing, and to write to him.

John Hemming: I thank the Minister for giving way on this particular point, because the right of individuals to petition the European Court of Human Rights is very important. In the past couple of months, I have been contacted by the Advice on Individual Rights in Europe—AIRE—centre, which assists people from England and the United Kingdom generally in going to the ECHR. The AIRE centre was concerned that paperwork necessary for people to petition the European Court was not being provided—I am talking about family law, which the Minister will not be surprised to learn is one of my interests. Is there someone in the Government who would assist a petitioner who is being refused their documentation and thereby being prevented from going to the European Court?
	Secondly, although it has signed it, the UK is one of the few countries not to have ratified protocol 4 to the European convention on human rights. That protocol means that one cannot take somebody's passport off them. Is there a reason why the UK continually fails to ratify that protocol? Does the Minister feel that it is acceptable that somebody is banned from leaving the country in that way?

Caroline Flint: It is not forgotten. I acknowledge how frustrating and difficult the process is. In answer to the earlier intervention by the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham, I can say that the Foreign Secretary told Sudanese Vice-President Taha in New York on 27 September that the Sudanese Government should co-operate with the International Criminal Court over crimes committed in Darfur and should take bolder and more ambitious action to bring peace in Darfur. The process is difficult, slow and frustrating, but the UK Government are doing all we can on a number of different fronts, through our development funds and our engagement on every level, to try to support a peaceful resolution in Sudan.
	Human rights work is not simply about exposing abuse. It is about changing mindsets, and so our work across the globe, whether in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe or Iraq, is targeted and pragmatic. The end point is not necessarily to humiliate a Government, but to get them to change and to reach a point where there are no longer 7,500 people on death row in Pakistan, where the Afghan Government do not execute 15 people in the middle of the night, where Zimbabwe has free elections and where women are no longer, as my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) mentioned earlier, the victims of so-called honour crimes in northern Iraq.
	Before I finish my remarks, I want to return to my original theme.

Caroline Flint: I should not like the right hon. and learned Gentleman or anyone else to interpret anything that I have not said. I mentioned that our work in the Foreign Office is closely linked to the work of DFID and the Ministry of Defence, and there clearly have been situations, as no doubt there will be in future, where our military capacity will play a contribution, but they have to be determined case by case. Last week, for example, it was interesting for me to meet British soldiers in Cyprus who are part of the UN peacekeeping forces trying to make sure that hostilities do not erupt in the island. Some of the British soldiers whom I met were from South Yorkshire, where my constituency is, and they had just come from Darfur and other places around the world where they daily witness violence and the death of civilians. I do not want anyone to intimate that we do not think carefully about the issue, but today's debate is intended to look particularly at what the Foreign Office does in relation to human rights and democracy in the world.

Caroline Flint: I understand that some of that debate arises from the US presidential campaign, so I am not sure that it is appropriate for me to comment. One thing is clear, however: there will be a new president in the months to come, so there will be opportunities to think about our relationship with the US on the international stage, as well as the relationship between the European Union and the US. That will be interesting and will, I hope, build on our constructive relationship with the US and offer new opportunities.

David Lidington: I very much hope that when Foreign Office Ministers meet their counterparts from whichever country, the promotion of human rights is part of the agenda for discussion.
	Having made those qualifications, the principle remains true: if we pursue our national interest while neglecting our policy's human rights implications we will fail. Not only do we have a moral imperative to act when human rights violations occur; it is in our national interest to see human rights advanced and protected worldwide. A world in which those values prevail is one that is more secure, more stable and more prosperous than the world we have today. Our foreign policy should reflect, in our conduct abroad, the values that we cherish at home.

Tony Baldry: My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. May I put to him another reason why it is important that this must be done at EU level? It strikes me, as vice-chairman of the all-party China group, that one of the difficulties that we have in situations to do with countries such as China or India is that we are simultaneously trying to promote trade and talking about human rights. It is often difficult for individual countries to do that in the same conversation, whereas if the EU as a whole brings pressure to bear on China or India on an issue such as Burma, we are making it clear that irrespective of our separate interests our concern about human rights is paramount and overwhelming.

Mark Pritchard: My hon. Friend touched on the subject of apostasy. Does he share my concern that, never mind what is going on over there, people here in this country who choose, or choose to turn away from, particular faiths are being threatened with death? Will he put on record our Front Bench's view on such a scenario in this country?

David Lidington: Any threats of that nature would seem, prima facie, to be a breach of criminal law in England, and I would like to see robust action being taken against the perpetrators of any such threats. We are rightly proud of our tradition of religious toleration in this country. It took us many years of struggle, debate and difficulty to reach it, and it is a prize on to which we need to hold fast.
	It is not enough to speak about abuses of human rights in other countries. As has already been mentioned, if we are to be taken seriously in the world, we must be ready to acknowledge when we—or one of our allies—gets things wrong. There is no doubt in my mind that allegations of prisoner abuse or of rendition leading to torture, however isolated, have done a great deal of damage to the moral authority of the western world. Our words will carry weight only if they are supported by efforts to adhere to the high standards that we preach.
	I welcome the thorough analysis of the claims about rendition that was conducted earlier this year by the Government and by the United States Department of State. I was pleased that firm assurances have now been given that rendition involving this country will not be permitted unless it is undertaken strictly in compliance with our country's laws. However, there is a loose end to the rendition question that needs to be tied up, and I hope that the Minister will be able to deal with this point in her response to the debate.
	In December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the international covenant for the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance, and Britain was active in promoting that covenant. However, we have not yet signed it. In a written answer on 14 November 2007, Lord Malloch-Brown acknowledged that there had been a delay. In a debate on 17 July this year, I asked the Foreign Secretary whether the continuing delay was due to genuine worries about security, or simply to internal delays in the Foreign Office. The right hon. Gentleman said that he would write to me
	"with details of where in the Foreign Office's pending tray the issue lies."—[ Official Report, 17 July 2008; Vol. 479, c. 499.]
	Three months on, I am still waiting for that promised response. I appreciate that the Foreign Secretary has had other matters on his mind during the summer recess. However, perhaps he now finds himself with more time on his hands than he had anticipated a few weeks ago. A response is overdue on this significant question in the context of our concern over rendition and detention, and I hope that the Government will not delay further in giving Parliament a proper response.
	In pursuing our policy objectives, we also need to support effective treaties and institutions to defend and enlarge human rights. I am happy to reiterate my party's support for the negotiations to secure an arms trade treaty and for the United Nations programme of action on the small arms trade. My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) referred earlier to the responsibility to protect. We want to see the United Nations work, but, as he said, Darfur surely shows that at the moment neither the United Nations peacekeeping arrangements nor those that exist at regional level through the African Union is anything like adequate or effective.
	We would also like to see the UN Human Rights Council work effectively, but I agreed with the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) when he said that its performance had been disappointing so far. If we look at the table on pages 54 and 55 of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office report on human rights, we see listed the voting on key resolutions—those that the FCO decided were the most important. Of those 10 resolutions debated by the UN Human Rights Council, the UK voted against seven and abstained on the other three. One has to ask what is going wrong with that institution when our Government find themselves unable to support any of the 10 most important resolutions.
	Clearly, a number of things are going wrong with that UN body. It is surely not right that a country can be elected to the Human Rights Council without even signing up to basic international treaties such as the international covenant on civil and political rights. Surely the process of universal periodic review—the questioning and testing of each country's human rights record—needs to take place in such a way that the countries serving on the Human Rights Council have their records examined first. One should surely expect at the very minimum that the examinations of the records of members of the HRC would have been concluded before the half way mark of the term of sitting. Something is clearly going wrong when, in the universal periodic review sessions earlier this year, we find that Algeria had a great deal of critical comment to make about the Czech Republic and, indeed, the United Kingdom—as I made clear earlier, however, I am not afraid of our being self-critical—but had little to say about its own record. Nor, sadly, did many countries from outside the developed west challenge nations such as Algeria and Tunisia about their human rights records when their turn for examination came.
	Next year, the Human Rights Council faces a very big test with the planned conference in Geneva, which follows up the world conference against racism held in Durban in 2001. Let us be honest about it: Durban was a travesty, with Israel singled out for attack and the then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, walking out in protest. Let me make this clear: I have criticised Israel in the past and I will continue to do so over its settlement policy, the route of the security barrier and its treatment of Palestinians, but the notion that Israel—and Israel above all—should be singled out is to deny the reality of what is happening on human rights in the world today.
	It is the reputation of the United Nations, and in particular the Human Rights Council, that will be at stake in Geneva next year, and I have to say that the omens are not good. The chairman of the conference planning committee is Libya, the vice-chairman is Iran and the rapporteur is Cuba. Will the ministerial team tell us during this debate whether Her Majesty's Government plan to send Ministers to attend the conference in Geneva or have they already, like Canada, written it off as a bad job? Will the Government fund non-governmental organisations to attend the conference? I think that we deserve some straight answers on those points.
	People who have glimpsed freedom—whether it be through books, television, the internet or travel—will never be content until they have secured it for themselves. As Eleanor Roosevelt said 60 years ago:
	"People who continue to be denied the respect to which they are entitled as human beings will not acquiesce forever in such denial".
	The ideas embodied in the universal declaration of human rights were then and remain now a beacon of hope and optimism to those who endure tyranny and oppression. All of us here, from whichever party or political tradition we come, have a duty to cherish and uphold those ideas today.

Bruce George: One would hope that as a result of the inexorable process of democratisation, the more the population are educated and the more—dare I say it?—bourgeois they become, the more they will not be prepared to acquiesce to a decision-making process emanating from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. One would hope, therefore, that the Chinese reach a point that we and most, or at least many, other countries have reached. Russia has not reached that point, I am afraid, because its progress in the rather anarchic democracy of Yeltsin has been deleted. We may not quite be returning to the Soviet era, but we are certainly heading towards an era in which sovereign democracy is as plausible a concept of democracy as were the people's democracies in eastern and central Europe from the 1940s onwards.
	I should like to say that the United Nations is doing a good job. Other international organisations are certainly doing a good job—including the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, although the Russians can veto any decision made in the OSCE. I am not the foremost devotee of the European Union system, but I have been back and forth quite frequently exploring the EU's role in promoting democracy, and it is formidable. We should note how well it functions in observing elections. It is now probably almost as good as the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which I consider to be the jewel in the OSCE's crown and to represent the gold standard for election observation.

Jo Swinson: The hon. Lady is right. Clearly, people in China have to be very careful about what they say and where they say it, but that does not necessarily mean that they are not thinking about these things. I am sure that Members will be interested to look at the book that she mentions. She has made a very good point.
	I am sure that dismay is felt across the House at the events that we have seen take place in Zimbabwe over the weekend with Mugabe's power grab. There was that little chink of optimism with the signing of the agreement on 15 September, but it is beginning to look like nothing more than a delaying tactic on Mugabe's part. Last Tuesday, during Foreign and Commonwealth Office questions, the Foreign Secretary said:
	"Mr. Tsvangirai is ready to work with Mr. Mugabe on the distribution of Cabinet portfolios, and that is the key test now."—[ Official Report, 7 October 2008; Vol. 480, c. 128.]
	Clearly, Mugabe has failed that test. I hope that the Minister will say in summing up what action the Government are taking to increase the international pressure on him to reverse this weekend's power grab, and whether they still believe that the current system is sustainable in trying to get the result that we want, or whether we will have to bring in a new mediator to achieve any progress.
	We also need some consistency from the Government on Zimbabwe. The Foreign Office has been very good at urging the promotion of human rights, at trying to stop the torture and bloodshed and in condemning the actions of Mugabe, and I am sure that they have been pursuing all the diplomatic channels to try to get movement in that country. However, at the same time the Home Office is having legal arguments to try to send back asylum seekers who are fleeing the very torture that the Foreign Office is condemning, and some failed refugees have been in detention centres in this country for two years. Is that really the kind of human rights position that we want to promote? Is that really going to give us the moral authority to criticise Zimbabwe's attitude to human rights? How can the Government possibly have a clear conscience in this matter? Surely Zimbabweans here must be allowed to work to support themselves while this situation persists.
	The United States of America proves that democracy is no guarantee of human rights. I welcome the Minister's strong condemnation of waterboarding—one of the torture methods apparently sanctioned by the US. Not only is that country condoning torture, but it uses the death penalty, including on some young men and women, and it has the illegal and immoral stain of Guantanamo Bay on its conscience. The Government did finally secure the release of the UK citizens, although I note that one UK resident is still up for one of these military commissions, or kangaroo courts, which certainly does not conform to the standards of justice that we would hope for and expect. It took the Government far too long to act on Guantanamo, and that was shocking. I remember Ministers referring to it as an anomaly, refusing to condemn it or to say that it should be closed. We always welcome a sinner who repents, but it took too long. I suppose that it is some cause for optimism that both candidates for the US presidency have talked about closing Guantanamo Bay. It must be the top priority for the next US President if that person is to have any moral authority on democracy and human rights on the world stage.
	Before I conclude, I should like to apologise to the House. A prior commitment clashes with this debate, and because the debate was delayed because of the earlier statement, I will not be able to stay to hear the next two speakers. However, I intend to come back as soon as I can to hear the rest of the debate.
	Effective international institutions are of course very important to the aim of improving human rights—through the EU, the UN, NATO, the Council of Europe, the Commonwealth and beyond. Closer co-operation across Government with our foreign counterparts is crucial to the security of this country. It is important that respect for human rights and the liberty of the individual is not undermined in the name of security. The UK must play a role on the international stage to promote human rights and encourage democracy. The challenges are huge, and sadly, the UK's position has been undermined by our actions in Iraq. None the less, we must redouble our efforts, and I hope that the mooted supposed Government U-turn on 42 days that may come shortly is a sign that they, too, are keen to safeguard human rights in the UK. That would indeed be a step in the right direction to give us back the authority to be a positive influence for democracy and human rights in the rest of the world.

Mike Gapes: I reiterate my welcome to my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) and my hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Gillian Merron) to their positions on the Front Bench. I look forward to scrutinising their work closely through the Foreign Affairs Committee over the coming months and years.
	I spent last week with the Committee at the United Nations in New York, and I want to share with the House some impressions that are pertinent to this debate. There seems to be a great expectation throughout the UN system—among the people who work in the UN full time, the permanent representatives of many countries and the non-governmental organisations—that, as has been mentioned, Guantanamo will be closed, although there does not seem to be much discussion on the lines set out in a previous Foreign Affairs Committee report, about how we in the rest of the world can contribute to that closure. Some very dangerous people who are detained there will still have to be dealt with. It is easy glibly to say, "Shut the place". The decision also has to be taken on what to do with 100 to 150 hardened terrorists who are a great danger to many people.
	We have expectations that the attitude of the United States will change, becoming more multilateral and less unilateral. Of course, we have already seen the malign influence, which has gone from the UN system, of the unlamented John Bolton. His successor, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was ambassador in Afghanistan and in Iraq, is doing a much better job in assuaging people's concerns. In his urbane style, he is able to act as an antidote to the provocative and inflammatory work of his predecessor.
	However, we should not exaggerate what will happen with the change of the US presidency. Whoever is the next President, the United States will still have national interests, global interests and economic interests. It is a little naïve to think that the personality of the President will lead to a change in the policies of a country in which there is a separation of powers, and where there will be, as result of the economic crisis that we face today, less of a focus on trying to intervene in democracy and human rights issues worldwide, and more of a focus on coping with the economic consequences of the financial catastrophe that has hit the US harder than the rest of the world. I fear that there may be protectionist pressures in the US. I fear that there may be moves toward inward-looking behaviour.
	An interesting opinion poll was reported to a seminar that took place during the Democratic national convention in Denver a few weeks ago, which I had the privilege to attend. It showed that there has been a significant shift among American public opinion away from involvement in the rest of the world, and a greater shift among Democrat voters than among Republicans. We need to bear that in mind, because whether it is President Obama, as I hope it will be, or President McCain, there will be domestic pressures on them, which may mean that we have some uncomfortable responses to deal with. There will be demands on the rest of the world, as well as a more multilateralist approach.

Mike Gapes: There is a chance of that; all I am saying is that there will be other pressures on that presidency. If Mr. Obama appoints people such as Susan Rice, Tony Lake and others, some of whom served in the Clinton Administration and are well known in Europe, we can feel reasonably confident. Even a McCain presidency would be a significant improvement, in many respects, on what we had to deal with under President Bush. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) says that that would not be difficult. I do not want to go into that; I want to discuss the future.
	I wish to discuss a concern that has been touched on in the reference to the league of democracies. John McCain has surrounded himself with advisers, including Fred Kagan, who advocate a position of saying, in effect, that the United States, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan, and perhaps some other countries, should set themselves up outside the UN system and just go ahead on a kind of coalition of the willing on a grand scale. That is extremely dangerous, as such an approach would set back the cause of democracy. If the world's largest democracy, India, would not be part of that—I am sure that it would not be—and if the largest and most diverse country in democratic terms in Africa, South Africa, which, on paper, has the most pluralistic guarantees of human rights and civil liberties of any country in the world, was not part of it either, that would damage the call made so eloquently by Eleanor Roosevelt and the people of the United States when they played such a key role in establishing the United Nations system in the 1940s.

David Drew: Much as I would like to go down the route of discussing Sudan, because I have significant interest in that matter, I shall stick to talking about the ICC, about which there is a complete contradiction in American policy. The Americans have been implicitly supporting the ICC over the indictment of al-Bashir, but are not willing to see that they must sign up wholesale. It would not be difficult to improve on the Bush Administration, but to be fair to the Americans, they have been quite good on their involvement in Africa. I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that it would be a retrograde step if America were to pull back, become isolationist and lose its influence in Africa.

Mike Gapes: I am tempted to refer the hon. Gentleman to Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool. [Hon. Members: "And Foy."] And wherever.
	There are lessons to be learned from the failure of the Doha round talks. I am thinking not only of the responsibility of the US lobbies. European agricultural producers—tobacco producers and others—have had a serious impact on many developing countries. One issue that we need to assess is the trade consequences, which are very important for the issues of human rights, democracy and governance. If we move to bilateral regional trading blocs, foreign assistance arrangements or treaty arrangements on a bilateral basis, many small countries—many of the poorest countries—which do not have resources and do not have something that bigger countries want, will get missed out in the process and will not get the protections and support that they need.
	Although there is a certain amount of optimism in the UN, there are also some worries. In this cataclysmic week or month—or perhaps 17 months—there has been a recognition of something that we all knew was coming, although perhaps it is coming far more quickly than we thought. The economic power templates in the world are moving, but will political changes also result? China is already playing a much more engaged role in international institutions. In general, its role in the international community is a positive one, rather than a negative one.
	Interestingly, China has not sided with Russia in all issues internationally over recent months and years. Even over Georgia recently, the Russians failed to get support through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on their position regarding the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. However, there are worries about what might develop out of the embryonic SCO. Some people see it as the precursor to an axis of sovereignty: a group of countries that oppose any concept of the internationalisation of domestic issues. Some people see it as a potential rival to NATO and a bloc that, in time, could become far more important than it is now. Only time will tell, but clearly there is a debate to be had about where the UN system goes and where the universalist values of the 1948 declaration of human rights go in the future.
	A very interesting pamphlet has just been published by the European Council on Foreign Relations entitled, "A global force for human rights? An audit of European power at the UN". I recommend it, because it contains some interesting and pessimistic conclusions. It basically says that the European Union, over the last decade, has lost influence in the UN system and that our values—what the report calls liberal interventionist values—have been weakened. Reference has already been made to the Human Rights Council, but even in General Assembly votes and in the Security Council there has been a weakening of support for those values. Countries that the report describes as "swing states"—democracies such as South Africa and India—have sided with the authoritarians against the democrats on many issues, such as in the case of Burma. I hope that South Africa under its new temporary president and under the president elected next year will be truer to the democratic values of the liberation movement, the freedom charter and the constitution that they established and will bring in a much more engaged foreign policy rather than siding with those countries that are against intervention on foreign affairs.
	Reference has been made to the Foreign Affairs Committee's report on human rights. This is not the occasion for a big debate on the subject—I hope that we can have such a debate with the Minister in Westminster Hall at some point—but I want to draw attention to some points. The first is the question of trade union rights. The matter has not yet been mentioned, but it is one reason why Colombia is the only country in Latin America to be highlighted in the Foreign Office's report on these issues. Our Committee is critical of the fact that although we give military aid and support to the counter-narcotics forces and human rights training to the Colombian armed forces, there seems to be an increase in the pressure on and deaths and intimidation of active trade unionists in that country.
	President Uribe is one of our allies. He is a supposed partner of the United States and of this country, yet today I received a letter from somebody working for Thompsons, a solicitors firm that does a lot of work with trade unionists, pointing out another list of individuals—I will not go through the names—whose lives have been threatened. The Colombian Government are not prepared to provide them with protection when they are engaged in their trade union activities. That is unacceptable and the Government should be doing far more, both collectively through the EU and individually, to raise the issues of human rights, trade union rights and the protection of the brave men and women in the trade unions in Colombia.
	Finally, I want to say something about Russia and Georgia. My right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George) might not agree with what I am about to say, because he has had close, warm relations with the nascent democratic movement in Georgia. We need to be very careful that we do not just take the view, which seems to emanate from some people in the United States, that there are no issues in the conflict for which the Georgians should be criticised. Yes, the Russians have behaved deplorably—they overreacted massively and their recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is totally wrong and unacceptable, and it cannot be agreed with or recognised—but Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, was reckless and irresponsible in August and he did what he did despite advice from the United States and from many other countries not to behave in such a way.
	We need to be very clear that even though a country is a democracy, that does not mean that every action it takes will automatically be supported. The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) said that democracy is no guarantee of human rights, and she referred to the United States. That point also applies to Georgia. There was a worrying article in  The New York Times last week about crackdowns on opposition to Saakashvili in Georgia. The point also applies in Sri Lanka. That island has a democratic Government, but the most appalling human rights abuses are also going on. Many are carried out by the Tamil Tigers, but many others are carried out by the Sri Lankan armed forces. At the same time, the United Arab Emirates is an example of a country that is not a democracy where there is the rule of law, a civil society and respect, within parameters. One of the two—democracy and human rights—does not necessarily lead to the other.
	People such as President Bush who have the naive belief that if we get everywhere to have free and fair elections there will be no conflicts and no problems have a very dangerous world view. Unless the ethnic, tribal, religious and cultural differences in a society are resolved, and unless political structures and political space are created, even if there have been formal elections and changes of Government, the situation can end up like that in Georgia. Mr. Gamsakhurdia was followed by Mr. Shevardnadze, who was followed by Mr. Saakashvili, and none of them had total respect for the different minorities.
	In Sri Lanka, a significant minority of people on the island feel discriminated against. Extremist groups feed on that and make the situation far worse. We need to be cautious when we talk about democracy and human rights. We need to be more sophisticated about it. One does not automatically follow the other. Human rights can exist in societies that are not necessarily entirely democratic, while there can be democracies that do not respect the human rights either of people in their society or of their neighbours.

Malcolm Rifkind: I very much agree with the final remarks of the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), but when he deplores Russian recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia he should remember that the road to South Ossetia and Abkhazia began in Kosovo. There is a clear connection between those events, to which I shall return in a few moments.
	May I say in what I hope is a non-partisan way that I think that there is a basic confusion at present in the Government's whole approach to the promotion of democracy and human rights. If there was one defining feature of the first 10 years of this Labour Government, especially under Tony Blair and the late Robin Cook, it was the belief not only that there should be ethical foreign policy but that there would be occasions—perhaps more than in the past—when the west had to show, not simply by soft power and diplomatic means, but by the use of military power, its willingness and determination to change the political situation in other countries: to use military power to intervene not simply to prevent aggression, but to advance human rights or ensure regime change.
	That approach was very much associated with Tony Blair, but the point has been repeated by the current Foreign Secretary. He does not spend much time on it, but in some of his speeches he has emphasised the point that military intervention must be part of the Government's armoury as they seek to advance democracy and human rights. It was significant that the Minister for Europe, who opened the debate, said not a word about that. Indeed, even when I asked her views she had nothing to say of any significance as to whether that was the Government's position. I hope that we shall have a view about it.
	I declare my position in a simple and straightforward fashion: I have always believed that almost without exception it is a gross and foolish mistake to intervene in a military way in the internal affairs of another state. I argue that case not on some theoretical ground of national sovereignty—it is often alleged that people who take the view that I take have an objection to breaching national sovereignty even when there is the most serious abuse of human rights. That is not my position. It is the position of the Russian Government and of the Chinese Government, but it is not my view, which is simple: almost without exception, intervention in the internal affairs of another country, using military might, creates more harm than good. It ends up creating more problems than it solves and people will live to regret that fact.
	The issue is not about humanitarian intervention. When the Conservative Government were in power, I was responsible as Defence Secretary for the humanitarian intervention in Bosnia. We sent many thousands of British troops to help to provide food supplies and aid for people who would otherwise have starved. What we refused to do was intervene on one side or another, in a military sense, in the war being conducted at the time. We were criticised for that, but in light of the present Government's experience, both in Kosovo and in Bosnia, the arguments are profound.

Malcolm Rifkind: I will come to that point, and will give my hon. Friend a direct answer in just a moment, if I may.
	The fourth result of military intervention is, of course, the geopolitical consequences to which I referred in my opening comments. The independence of Kosovo, which was forced on the west against its wishes, unlocked a series of consequences. It has meant the fragmentation of parts of the Caucasus, and has led every small national minority in many states to believe that if it can only push us hard enough, it can create a further fragmentation of Europe and of the wider world. That has serious consequences that we are now experiencing.
	I now come to the point that my hon. Friend raised. Everything that I have said so far implies that one can somehow just ignore human rights abuses, however serious they are. I make one exception to my general principle, and that is in the case of real genocide. The word "genocide" has been used very widely. It has been used to talk about small massacres in towns, cities or villages, or against small numbers of people. Such events are terribly reprehensible, and I will come back to that issue. However, I entirely acknowledge, for a reason that I will explain, that if there is a genocide such as the holocaust, or such as that in Rwanda or Cambodia, in which a whole population is threatened with annihilation, of course the outside world cannot but intervene.
	How do I rationalise that, given what I have just been saying? I do so in a very simple way. I have argued that whenever one intervenes militarily in the internal affairs of a state one will create more harm than good. By definition, the one exception is genocide, because although military intervention will still create a political vacuum and change the political dynamic, and still lead to all sorts of consequences that were never intended, nothing can be as bad as the genocide that one has succeeded in stopping. In circumstances in which military intervention would prevent or stop a genocide—I mean genocide in its overall sense, not simply a massacre in a town or a village—the argument must point in the other direction.
	That leaves the question: what does one do about lesser human rights abuses, in which people are persecuted and sometimes slaughtered? I refer to the Srebrenicas of this world—

Malcolm Rifkind: And to Darfur, and so forth. In cases that my argument does not properly address, there is a spectrum of responses. Military intervention leading to regime change is at one end of the spectrum. There is a whole range of other options available. I do not just mean economic sanctions or diplomatic pressure, but options involving military means.
	When I was in government, we imposed a no-fly zone on Iraq. We stopped Iraq persecuting the Kurds. We were able to stop it persecuting the Shi'a. Saddam Hussein had no control over his own airspace. He was emasculated as a power that could show aggression to its neighbours. However, we did not have to invade Iraq to achieve that, and therefore we did not suffer all the terrible consequences that there have been in the past five years. There are options available, but there has been a lack of imagination on the part of the Bush Administration and, I must say, the British Government. There has been a belief that either there should be military intervention involving regime change, or soft power should be used. That quite ignores the spectrum of alternatives available, some of which may involve the use of our military assets.
	In the past 20 or 25 years, there has been a huge increase in democracy in the world. It is rightly often mentioned as a matter in which we should take huge pleasure. There has been such an increase in Latin America, central and eastern Europe and many countries of the far east, and that is marvellous. It is significant that all those changes—all these red, orange and purple revolutions—have almost entirely taken place without external intervention, as a result of the determination of the peoples of those countries.
	In his book, "The Audacity of Hope", Barack Obama says:
	"there are few examples in history in which the freedom that men and women crave is delivered through outside intervention. In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi's campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local awakening."
	I am not arguing that the outside world cannot influence events; of course it can. I am arguing against the ridiculous concept of the Bush doctrine and of the Blair Chicago speech—repeated by our current Foreign Secretary, although not with the same emphasis—which says that military intervention is the way in which one achieves internal democratic change in certain countries.
	Finally, there is another, highly relevant reason why such intervention will not work—why the Americans cannot, by themselves, create democracy in Iraq. It is a simple question of their staying power. Britain helped to create democracy in India because the Indians knew that we were going to stay there for a very long time. We were in India for 200 years. If one is somewhere for 200 years, of course one changes the culture of a country, affects its options and has a powerful impact on its political development. If, however, as was the case in Afghanistan or Iraq, from the moment we arrive, our objective, supported by public opinion, is to get out as quickly as possible, the domestic population of the country knows it perfectly well. It knows that it has to tolerate us while we are there, but it is only too anxious to see us go, and will then determine its own political destiny.
	That is not an argument against human rights or democracy—far from it. It is simply to recognise that we are talking about matters that, rightly, will be determined by the populations of the countries concerned. With the single exception of cases in which there is genocide, I believe that military intervention will do more harm than good. The examples of Kosovo and Iraq are evidence of that. Our Government may in practice have given up such a policy, but they continue to pay lip service to it. I hope that they will recognise that that is not a sustainable position, and will reverse it as soon as possible.

Tony Wright: In a moment, I want to continue the argument and the conversation that the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) began. He took the debate into interesting and difficult territory that forces us to examine some rather large issues.
	Before I do that, let me say that one of the joys of a debate on democracy and human rights is that one can talk about almost anything one wants. I could not help but be struck by the headline of today's  The Times; it was simply: "Banks nationalised". The idea that there would ever have been such a headline in  The Times beggars belief. It immediately put me in mind of Sidney Webb's Fabian essays of 1889, in which he says:
	"The inevitable outcome of Democracy"—
	with a capital "D", by the way—
	"is the control by the people themselves, not only of their own political organisation, but, through that, also of the main instruments of wealth production".
	Of course, that was the belief of many in my political tradition: democracy was not simply a set of political arrangements but a way in which the people could discipline private power. Indeed, that was the governing class's fear of democracy, and why it was resisted so furiously for so long. The worry was about not just people having a vote but about what the vote would do, and what people would want to do, armed with the vote, to private economic power. It is a nice symmetry, therefore, that today the banks are being nationalised, and I shall return to that at the end of my contribution.
	When we talk about democracy, we use the term without defining it. We use it as a shorthand for free electoral competition, free expression, the rule of law, respect for differences and for minorities, and so on. We often prefix it with words such as "liberal" or "pluralistic" to show that we do not believe simply in majoritarianism, because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, suggested, it is possible to have majoritarian tyrannies. Human rights are properly attached to democracy as a qualifier, to show that we believe not in majoritarian tyrannies but in the kind of democracy that recognises that individual citizens possess rights that are to be protected, even against majorities.
	That is why the link between democracy and human rights is important. It is a source of regret that in recent years the phrase "human rights" has begun to be used pejoratively by the Daily Mail and parts of the Conservative party. That profoundly damages the broader human rights cause, because it detaches us from a broad movement for human progress and the protection of individual freedoms. We must not allow such denunciation or criticism to enter our culture of human rights, and I hope that it no longer prevails.
	I often think that there is a certain unreality to Foreign and Commonwealth Office Question Time. We tend to ask the Government to do things about places almost anywhere in the world. We have a roll call of places where things need to be done, and we ask Ministers what they are going to do. The realistic answer in almost all cases is, "There is nothing very much that we can do about those things on our own. All we can do is work with others to try to make some improvements." The mentality that we bring to proceedings, however, is that the gunboats are there, poised to be dispatched to whichever part of the world is causing difficulty. We need a dose of realism.
	The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) gave us a dose of realism when he explained why intervention to do good almost always does harm, certainly if military means are used. He argued his case extremely powerfully, and I want to pursue it by briefly discussing two instances that have preoccupied the Commons in recent years: the Iraq adventure and Europe and the European treaty, which force us to think rather large thoughts about democracy and human rights.
	I dissent somewhat from the right hon. and learned Gentleman, as I believe that the tragedy of Iraq is that it stopped us thinking creatively about the doctrine of liberal intervention, because it seemed absolutely to validate the proposition that he advanced. So catastrophic was the failure that it persuaded people that it was not even worth thinking about how we can sometimes intervene to do good, even by military means, and I say that as someone who did not vote for the Iraq war. I wanted to believe the arguments. I wanted the then Prime Minister to tell me that this campaign was directed against the world's worst tyrant, and that we were going to ensure a little instalment of freedom, but he was careful not to say that. He said that, in fact, it was consistent with international principles: the objective was not regime change, it had been validated by the United Nations, and so on, but none of that persuaded me. Nor was I persuaded, to use the right hon. and learned Gentleman's test, that it would do more good than harm. I thought that the warnings about the acceleration of terrorism were probably justifiable, and that we should do things only if there was a good chance of their succeeding.

John Mason: I should start by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with a lot of what the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) has just said in favour of democracy, so I shall delete that part from my speech.
	It is a tremendous privilege to stand before the House today and have the opportunity to speak. I am only too well aware of the history of this place and of the number of highly respected Members who have represented my own beloved city of Glasgow and constituencies round about: some of them are here today. I thank the many Members who have warmly welcomed me to the House, and particularly Mr. Speaker for his help during the two months before I was sworn in; it is good to have a neighbouring Glasgow Member in such a key position. I was particularly keen to take part in this debate on democracy and human rights, but first I would like to make some opening remarks, as I believe is the custom.
	The people of Glasgow, East elected me to send a message to the Prime Minister and now I am here to deliver it. That message is clear and simple: it is time for action to help hard-pressed households who, given soaring food and fuel bills, are struggling to make ends meet. During the by-election, Scottish National party pressure forced a U-turn on the 2p rise in road fuel duty. People are struggling to make ends meet, and an SNP success in Glenrothes would force more action over soaring household bills.
	The swing that elected me to what was Labour's third safest seat shows that Labour's days of taking Scotland for granted are over. It is clear that people have had enough of the party's broken promises, and want a change for the better.
	Less than four short months ago, I was happily taking part in debates in Glasgow city chambers, with the outlook of a quiet July and a holiday in prospect. However, as has been said,
	"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
	Gang aft agley."
	We think that we have the future of ourselves, our economy and our country safely planned out, but events take a turn and we find ourselves not where we expected to be.
	As I reflect on the past in this place, I particularly wish to mention my immediate predecessor, David Marshall. Although I had been a councillor in Glasgow for some 10 years, it was only when he became the Member for the newly created constituency of Glasgow, East in 2005 that our paths began to cross. I must say that in all my dealings with David Marshall I always found him to be helpful and courteous to me and to others, and I know that that was the experience of many who met him. Since my election, a number of constituents have approached me about a problem that David Marshall had been dealing with and asked me to take it up as well. I am more than happy to do that, particularly in the case of several asylum seekers whom David Marshall was helping and I seek to help as well.
	Despite what is reputed to be the robust nature of Glasgow politics, many of the concerns of the two main parties there—the Scottish National party and Labour—are shared concerns. For example, in his maiden speech in June 1979, David Marshall referred to the poor state of many school buildings in the city. Twenty-nine years later, I am very much at one with him on that. He clearly believed that all children everywhere deserve a decent education in decent buildings, and I want to follow his example on that point. Just the other day, I received a letter from David Marshall wishing me well. That says a lot about him as a man. I am sure that the House would want to join me in wishing him a swift recovery from illness and a long and fulfilling retirement.
	I understand that it is also customary on these occasions to mention one's constituency, and I would like to make a few points. I assume that a number of Members visited Glasgow, East in July—although I realise that some could not make it—and were able to see for themselves the success and the problems. It is certainly not an area of uniform devastation, as some have had us believe—in fact, it is a very mixed area, like so many others. Old heavy industry has largely gone, with some new manufacturing and service industries in its place, but still one sees the wide open spaces where the factories used to stand. We have to do something about that.
	Much of the '50s and '60s housing has been refurbished or demolished, with new and better housing in its place. The Scottish Government are providing grant for new house building, which is very welcome, as are restrictions on the right to buy. However, our Government's powers are limited. We need to do something about that.
	Some old schools have been combined and replaced with excellent modern facilities. However, there are still many popular schools with good educational attainment, despite the inspector's report says that the building itself is very poor. All that I hear from head teachers and their staff is that a modern building is a huge morale booster for teachers and pupils. Labour-controlled Glasgow city council has let the schools down for decades. We need to do something about that.
	We look forward to the Commonwealth games coming to Glasgow, particularly to the east end, in 2014. Glasgow has done well in having many of the facilities in place already. It is encouraging that the Scottish Government and the city council, despite being of different political persuasions, are willing to work so closely together in having everything in place for the games. It would be even better if lottery funding could be released to fund a lasting legacy, as has happened with many similar events in England. However, I constantly hear complaints from youngsters about the lack of local affordable facilities, which they feel are too far away or too expensive. We need to do something about that.
	In preparing this speech, I was encouraged to read some of those made by Members in the past. I was struck that in at least two I found concern about one of the main issues that concerns me today—the widening gap in our society between the rich and the poor. As I listened to Prime Minister's Questions last week, I noted the suggestion that things started to go seriously wrong in 1979. I will leave it to others to judge whether that is the case, but it seems to me that since that date some in our society have done incredibly well and some have done extremely badly, and that that trend has continued almost seamlessly no matter which party has been in power.
	One maiden speech that I read referred to
	"a Budget which took from the needy to give to the greedy and which made the rich richer and the poor poorer."—[ Official Report, 14 June 1979; Vol. 968, c. 699.]
	That was from David Marshall in 1979. This is from another maiden speech:
	"This is all because the Government's philosophy is that the rich must get richer by way of tax cuts and that the poor must become poorer to ensure true prosperity."—[ Official Report, 27 July 1983; Vol. 46, c. 1241.]
	That was from the then Member for Dunfermline, East in 1983. Both statements are criticisms with which I wholeheartedly agree. When a new measure is brought to this house by whatever Government in the coming years, that is the measure against which I will judge them. I will ask myself, "Does this measure narrow or widen the gap between rich and poor?" We are clearly in difficult economic times in this country and throughout the world. Yes, there may be a need for belt tightening by many of us, but if that does happen, it must be those who have least who tighten their belts least and those who have most who tighten their belts most.
	Let me turn to the subject of the debate: democracy and human rights. I am the most recently elected member of this House, so I have been most recently subjected to the democratic process. I would not go so far as to say that that gives me the strongest mandate of any politician in Scotland, but it does say something about how people in Scotland are thinking at this time. A growing number of voters in Glasgow, East support independence, and, despite scaremongering in some quarters, they are not afraid to vote for the party of independence. For too long, Unionist parties have sought to instil fear in the people of Scotland if they dared even to think of independence, but those scare tactics work only for so long because people eventually see through them. In this by-election, many people broke with family tradition when they voted. No longer are the people of Glasgow, East looking backwards—rather, they are looking forward in hope.
	The two countries where I have lived most to date have been Scotland and Nepal; whether England will overtake Nepal remains to be seen. In the 1980s, Nepal had a ruling monarch with elected representatives, but the latter had little power. Political parties were not even allowed, so every candidate was an independent—allegedly. However, party tensions still lay below the surface. I remember sitting in my flat in Kathmandu during an election when a random stone came flying through the window. Human rights there were clearly limited, not least in the religious field. It was against the law to change one's religion, and baptisms of new believers were generally carried out secretly at night. The most open I was able to be about my faith was at Christmas, when outdoor carol singing was allowed. However, I was still nervous that every time we went round a corner the police would be standing there. Clearly, other countries around the world have even less democracy and fewer human rights than Nepal. I am glad to say that the situation in Nepal has greatly improved over recent years, although that country still has its fair share of problems.
	In Scotland we have a variety of voting systems for each of the four main levels of representation: Europe, Westminster, the national Government and local councils. While most of that will be familiar to Members here, it is the relatively new local council system that I want to bring to their attention and commend to them. It is a system of proportional representation by single transferable vote. It has been relatively well understood by the electorate, with very few spoiled papers. It is already used by some trade unions and pensions funds. It combines an emphasis on the individual candidate and on the political party—a balance that no other system is able to achieve. I want to commend the two parties in the previous Scottish coalition for combining to introduce that excellent system in my country. I hope that it can be extended elsewhere.
	In conclusion, I thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for your forbearance and Members of all parties for their warm welcome.

Hugh Bayley: I welcome the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) to this House. He has made an accomplished maiden speech, and I know that we will be hearing a great deal from him over the weeks and months to come. I wish him well during his time in this House. Many hon. Members on both sides of the House will appreciate what he said about his predecessor, David Marshall. I was on the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association UK branch executive committee when David Marshall was its chairman, and I saw the passion and diligence with which he pursued Commonwealth interests and foreign policy concerns through the association.
	I can tell the hon. Gentleman that, like many of Members of my party, I paid a visit to Glasgow, East in July. I travelled by the National Express east coast rail service. National Express is an English company, with headquarters in my constituency, the City of York, and its services benefit both the Scottish economy and the English economy. In fact, it is one of those institutions that shows the interdependence of Scotland and England, and the benefits that links between those two parts of the United Kingdom bring to people in Scotland and in England.
	In Glasgow, East I knocked on doors, I spoke to many constituents and I did all that I could legally, decently and honestly to prevent the hon. Gentleman from being elected, and I failed—but he should not think that I fail in every political challenge that I take on. I warmly congratulate him on his victory. Perhaps the fact that his party can mount a challenge and capture a Labour seat that was seen as so safe before the election is a compelling illustration of the vibrancy and the fundamental strength of democracy in this country. There cannot be a multi-party democracy without opposition parties. Opposition parties can be a big headache for a ruling party, but it would be a far bigger headache if we did not have viable opposition parties in this country.
	The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) has now slipped out of the Chamber, but his speech raised the tone of the debate. I know that at this time of night, gastric pressures make people flee from the Chamber—they are affecting me, too. I wish that the right hon. Gentleman were still in his place, but I hope that he will see how Members have responded to what he said. It is difficult to disagree with his conclusion on Iraq—that military intervention has done more harm than good. However, I would say to him something that the Select Committee on International Development said to the Government before the war, which was that at least as much attention ought to be paid to the task of post-war reconstruction as was paid to the task of the military campaign. The real catastrophe in Iraq has been a catastrophe of political mistakes being made in the post-war situation.
	The convincing case that the right hon. Gentleman made on Iraq does not, however, ring true when we go from the particular to the general. The arguments that he made on the Balkans ignore the harm that was caused by non-intervention. When he was Secretary of State for Defence, I remember going with a cross-party group of Members to NATO headquarters in Brussels to talk to people about whether there was a military response that could be made to the genocide—and I use that word, which he used in his speech—in Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia. A string of ambassadors, directors and officials told us that it was difficult to intervene militarily, that the Serbs were tough fighters who held down eight German divisions in the second world war, that it was difficult mountainous country and that there was not much we could do in military terms.
	We were about to leave at the end of the day when a message came from Field Marshal Richard Vincent, who was the chairman of NATO's military committee at the time. He asked us to speak to him, and he told us a very different story. He obviously was not speaking on behalf of any Government, and he made the point that he had a NATO role at that time, not a role as a British Army officer. He said that sooner or later, Europe was going to have to take military action to stop what Serbs were doing in the former Yugoslavia, and that the longer we waited, the more battle-hardened and effective Serb regular and paramilitary troops would be. He told us a story: as a boy, he had been taken by his father to see the miracle of a Prime Minister flying back to Britain by aeroplane. He saw Chamberlain come off that aeroplane and wave that piece of paper, and he said that that was appeasement then, and he believed that not intervening militarily in Bosnia was appeasement too.  [ Interruption. ] I see that I have got my marching orders from the Whip.
	On Kosovo too, the right hon. Gentleman said that there was no genocide so we should not have intervened. At the time of military intervention, the majority of the Kosovar Albanian population had been driven out of their country, across the border into neighbouring countries. It was an unstable position, and I believe that non-intervention would have done more harm than good.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) said, people sometimes use the terms "democracy" and "human rights" almost as if they are interchangeable. The ideas are related, of course. Both concepts require rulers to cede power to the people. They both imply the accountability of those with power to a broader constituency, but they are not the same thing. It is possible to have some human rights, such as habeas corpus or the right to a fair trial, without living in a democracy, but democracy cannot exist without human rights. That is why the Council of Europe requires countries to meet human rights requirements before they can join. I believe that the Foreign Secretary is right to make democracy one of the key goals of British foreign policy, but promoting democracy internationally is not easy, and I believe that distinguishing between human rights and democracy helps to highlight how Governments can promote democracy effectively.
	Western support for democracy has been tainted by the military interventions in Iraq, certainly, and in Afghanistan, to some extent. They make it clear that democracy cannot be imposed from outside. Democracy is a collective concept—without a thirst for democracy from the people, it cannot grow. It certainly cannot be imposed by military force. The best the military can do is to create conditions that allow security and the rule of law to flourish—in other words, to create human rights conditions that permit democracy to grow if there is a public thirst for it. Human rights are a precondition for democracy.
	For the past three years, I have had the great privilege of chairing the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. It was created when the Berlin wall fell, and over the years it has done extremely important work to support democrats, reformers and democratic political parties in the countries of central and eastern Europe when they were breaking free from Soviet control. It has done similar work in other parts of the world, such as Africa and the middle east. In the early years of this decade, it lost its way. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), who was my predecessor, began to rebuild the organisation.
	WFD is a Foreign Office sponsored, non-departmental public body. Shortly before I was appointed to the foundation's board, the Foreign Office commissioned an independent review of the organisation from River Path Associates. The review was highly critical. It proposed a number of options, including winding up the foundation, scaling down its operations or transferring its funding responsibilities from the Foreign Office to Parliament. Some of those criticisms were completely unreasonable, but there were some problems in the organisation, and I told the then Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), that I was prepared to take on the appointment in order to lead a process of reform and renewal, but that if the Foreign Office wanted to close the organisation down, it should go ahead.
	I was appointed on the basis of leading a process of reform in the organisation. The Foreign Office kept its side of the bargain, and I believe that WFD has kept its part of the deal and has emerged as a stronger, more relevant and more effective organisation. I should like to thank my fellow governors and members of the board—I see one in his place tonight, the hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne)—and the chief executive and the staff of the foundation. I should also like to thank the staff of the political parties who implement the party-to-party foundation programmes, and the Foreign Office officials and Ministers who have supported the foundation during the three years for which I have been in the chair.
	During those three years, we have put through quite a number of reforms. We have concentrated the foundation's resources so that it now has greater impact in fewer countries and fewer specialised fields of work. We have moved the foundation's focus from being a London-based grant giver funding one-off projects to being a manager of sustained programmes of work over several years. That has led us to move some of our permanent staff from working in London to working in the field. We have reduced the percentage of the budget being spent on administration, and taken the difficult decision to make some senior management posts redundant. We have also increased our overall funding without increasing administration—

Tim Boswell: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley). I listened to his remarks about the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and I pay warm tribute to his contribution in leading it for the past three years. It is also a privilege for me to be the first Member on the Conservative Benches to congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) on his maiden speech, which was graceful, gracious and informative about his constituency. We ask no more than that.
	In a sense, this debate is a tribute to the power of democracy and to our ability to support each other even when we disagree with each other. I have found the insights that I have heard today fascinating and mutually reinforcing, from all the different aspects. I hope that the House will forgive me if my comments are a little more related to the legal side of human rights, because that is a personal interest and, as it happens, a familial interest of mine. I also have experience in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which I have found very stimulating and informative on this issue.
	Looking back at the history of all this, we can see the roots in world war 2, going back as far as the Atlantic charter. It was signed by the two nations of Britain and America, which Churchill described as the great democracies. It was a reaction to absolutism, aggressive war and the holocaust. I think it was also an understanding of the need to temper the powers of the democratic state, which were exercised during wartime. It was also a celebration of the worth of every individual. It is about the respect we have for individuals and groups of people in our society.
	I commend the European convention of human rights itself as a clear document that is well worth reading. It has a surprisingly strong emphasis on private autonomy, private life and private decision making. That is well instanced in article 8, which recognises the right to private life, but then says that it is subject to any overriding interest, whether it be of national security, public safety, economic well-being, concerns about disorder or crime, health or morals or, finally, the protection of the rights or freedoms of others. The default position in human rights law thus lies firmly with individual rights, and any derogations are defined only in strictly limited and specified circumstances. Bearing in mind the strong influence of British lawyers in the drafting, it expresses in codified principles the pragmatism of our common law, and it is in no sense a sanction for arbitrary acts by central Governments.
	It is perhaps not without significance that the title of today's debate omits the third leg of the Council of Europe stool, which always refers to "democracy, human rights and the rule of law". Indeed, it is under the present Government that we have repatriated the convention and required Ministers to certify the compatibility of their legislation with the convention rights. Sometimes, they do not find it very happy when that is challenged.
	Nobody has said in today's debate—but I shall—that there is sometimes a backlash against human rights, although not perhaps against the simple ones. We can all sign up to the fact that we do not want people to be maimed, tortured or subjected to arbitrary imprisonment. That is easy. The more difficult situations arise when there is a clash of rights or where we feel some sense that rights are being extended to persons who do not deserve them. That is not my view. Our problem is that we all enjoy implicit rights, but we dislike explicit rights being extended to people who do not suit—whether they be terrorists, paedophiles or even just foreigners. That argument can then turn up in the tabloid press, with a very unpleasant set of overtones.
	As I just mentioned, those who drafted the European convention recognised from the start that there were limitations occasioned by public policy and that no absolute right was expressed in the convention. This rather difficult situation—the move from the easy rights to the complex rights—has, I think, been aggravated by a number of factors. This country has seen a huge growth in administrative law and judicial review. There has been a shift from concentration on individual rights—involving whether individuals are tortured or persecuted—to issues about group actions and groups of people, often fuelled by the media or by non-governmental organisations. The increase in challenges to authority is perhaps healthy. For example, whereas food rationing would have gone through on the nod as an administrative action during the war, if we started imposing a system of milk quotas now, that would nowadays immediately become subject to judicial review.
	Where do we go now for human rights? The first and strongest point is that we need to be very careful about our own record. There is a wonderful phrase in the convention about the general principles of law being recognised by "civilised nations". I have an idea that the UK thinks of itself and defines itself as one of those nations. It is no longer any good, however, simply putting ourselves forward as a civilised nation, with the assumption that everything we do here is above reproach.
	One really stimulating aspect of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is that it has 47 member countries—all in various stages of emerging democracy and with different traditional attitudes towards human rights. Whether Her Majesty's Government like it or not, those members can bite back at us. Critical reports were recently issued about the security of our postal voting system—already referred to earlier—and an outline report has been drafted on the 42-day detention proposals. That, of course, stresses the importance of process and safeguards. I am given to understand that the other place has taken a lively and, in my view, entirely commendable decision on that matter today—[Hon. Members: "Hear, hear."] The concept is not confined to the Council of Europe, because some rights are universal under the UN convention, and they extend to other issues such as disabilities, the rights of children and so forth.
	I am delighted to welcome the Minister for Europe to her new post and I am pleased to see in her place the Under-Secretary, who is going to wind up today's debate. I would like to provide them with a brief shopping list on human rights. I mentioned in an earlier intervention the importance of adequate resourcing for the Strasbourg Court and of following protocol 14 to improve process. I would like Ministers to look further into the whole business of Council of Europe conventions that we have signed but not ratified. A White Paper explaining why we have not ratified them—sometimes over many years—would be appropriate, even if some of them are no longer valid.
	I would also like further work to be done on the responsibility to protect both the definition of the circumstances justifying intervention and the means of securing it. Given that Ministers are now a certifying body, I would like them, along with central and local government officials, get better training in what the conventions mean. In domestic legislation, I would like greater use of principles clauses, which we used successfully in the Mental Capacity Act 2005. I would like to see greater awareness of the concept of human rights in education, notably in history and citizenship training. Better international exchanges between interested parties to promote a common understanding of the meaning of human rights under legal systems that formally differ from one another would also be helpful, as would more independent international monitoring of each other's practices. We have nothing to hide, so we should welcome that.
	As the final item on my list of specific interventions, I would like further work to be done on preparing for intense immediate intervention in conflict and crisis situations. I pay tribute to the work done during recent conflicts in Georgia by the teams of the European Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammerberg. It is very important that we are able to send such people in, because human rights go by the board when there is warfare.
	Today is a time for thinking about the big picture. On paper, we can have all the human rights we want, but we must have a human rights culture to accompany them. Perhaps the easiest bit is democracy, because we have been at that for many years, but we need to remind the general public that human rights are their rights, and that in a sense we will all need them at one time or another, whether for the purposes of anti-discrimination or for protection from arbitrary administrative action.
	We have moved a long way. For example, I participated in consideration of legislation driven by the European Court of Human Rights to change the law on transgender people. Also, as today has shown, by adding the rule of law to complete the trio, we have made Ministers think. Sometimes, as today, we have stopped them dead in their tracks.
	In the end, however, this will be a matter of attitudes. In the spirit of the conventions, whether European or United Nations, we need to start by leaving space—whether in Britain or worldwide; it does not matter where—for people to live and flourish without unwarranted interference. That is the respect side of human rights. We need proper discretion by Government—for example, over their storing of data. We need a sense of fairness between the parties that people have to deal with. If Government have to intervene, or are the provider of a public service, people using that service should be treated with decency.
	If we can get Ministers—who are public servants, as they should be—and then their private counterparts to act in that spirit, the advances in human rights that we have made in the last half century in this country, in Europe and internationally will be secured, and we can use and extend those universal principles to improve the future functioning of this planet and, above all, of the people who live on it.
	 Debate interrupted.

Jacqui Smith: I hope that my hon. Friend recognises that the reason for bringing forward the legislation in the first place was a recognition that the best way to defend all the communities in this country is to ensure that we take their security seriously. We are all clear in this House that terrorist atrocities have killed and maimed with no fear or favour when it comes to communities or religious backgrounds, and that everybody needs the sort of protection that comes from counter-terror legislation. I have drafted the Counter-Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill so that when and if it is needed we will have those protections in place for my hon. Friend's constituents, for mine and for the rest of the British public.

Stephen Crabb: I strongly welcome this debate on democracy and human rights, albeit that it has been truncated. It is easy to forget or underestimate how closely the proceedings of the House are watched and observed by individuals and groups across the world, including in countries that have nothing like the freedoms we enjoy. As a number of other Members have observed in their contributions, the debate is timely, as we are approaching the 60th anniversary of the signing of the universal declaration on human rights on 10 December 1948.
	Members will recall that last year we celebrated another anniversary in the human rights calendar—the bicentennial of the Act to abolish slavery—and 2007 saw a string of events and initiatives celebrating the decision that the House took 200 years ago. Some of the initiatives tried to link what happened then with the campaigns to eradicate modern forms of slavery. I think in particular of the work done on human trafficking, a clear example of modern slavery.
	For all the good work associated with the anti-slavery celebrations last year, 2007 was a year in which progress in tackling human rights abuses actually went backwards. From Burma to Zimbabwe, from Darfur to China, from Sri Lanka to any number of conservative Islamic regimes, human rights violations continued on a wide and systematic basis, and the international community was shown again to be weak and complacent in the face of atrocity and repression. Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, said in Amnesty's 2008 annual report that
	"2007 was characterised by the impotence of Western governments and the ambivalence or reluctance of emerging powers to tackle some of the world's worst human rights crises".
	The fact remains that injustice, inequality and impunity are still the hallmarks of our world. We are coming towards the end of 2008, and no one can honestly say that it looks like this has been a more positive year for addressing human rights abuses internationally.
	The question that we have all been trying to grapple with this afternoon is: what does putting human rights at the heart of foreign policy mean in practice in a country such as the UK, which still enjoys a measure of international leadership through the UN Security Council, the G8 and the EU, in an increasingly multilateral, interdependent world in which realism and the national interest are still vital, legitimate drivers of our interaction with other nation states? The starting point is to recognise that it is very much in our national interest to seek to push forward an international human rights agenda. Expanding political freedoms are often, but not always, accompanied by higher living standards, new stability and economic expansion around the world, all of which is good for the UK as it seeks to trade and interact globally.
	That was recognised 60 years ago when the international community came together in an unprecedented way to affirm that whatever national, ideological or cultural differences and interests divided the world, those divisions were superseded by a deep common interest in providing the conditions for human freedom to flourish, and so emerged the universal declaration, about which a number of hon. Members have already spoken.
	Anyone who has spent any time considering the UN's performance in defending those principles will question whether there is anything substantial to celebrate at the 60th anniversary of the signing of the declaration. For example, anyone who has examined the track record of the ludicrous UN Commission on Human Rights, the body that was supposed to take a lead on some of these issues, will know that it became a safe haven for tyrants and dictators. It was finally wound up two years ago. Depressingly, so far, the replacement UN Human Rights Council shows too many signs of repeating the bad old ways of its predecessor body.
	Amnesty International's 2008 report states that:
	"World leaders owe an apology for failing to deliver on the promise of justice and equality in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...In the past six decades, many governments have shown more interest in the abuse of power or in the pursuit of political self-interest, than in respecting the rights of those they lead."
	The responsibility to protect was one recent attempt by the international community to address the question of how we could realistically and practically defend the interests of those who are suffering from gross, systematic human rights abuses. As has already been discussed, at the heart of the matter is whether states have complete unconditional sovereignty over their own affairs, or whether the international community has the right to intervene militarily in a country for humanitarian purposes. It is three years since the doctrine of the responsibility to protect was first enunciated, and it has yet to be invoked. Time and again the international community has flinched and found a justification for inaction, in exactly the same way as it did 14 years ago when the world stood by as a brutal genocide was perpetrated in Rwanda.
	Earlier this year, there was a strong case for intervention under the responsibility to protect after Cyclone Nargis hit Burma, with resulting humanitarian disaster. The Burmese Government deliberately withheld aid from its citizens, thereby turning a natural disaster into a man-made genocidal disaster.

Keith Simpson: This has been a rather disrupted debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) reminded the House, this debate on the Government's human rights report, the Foreign Affairs Committee's reply and, hot off the press—it seems that the Government printers have been working overtime in the past 24 hours—the Government's response to that, would usually take place in Westminster Hall on a Thursday afternoon. We should be grateful that because of the Government's incompetence in managing their legislative programme they have had to use this debate as nothing more than a stocking filler for this afternoon. The Minister is frowning, but that is the fact of the matter. Despite that, we have had a very good, wide-ranging debate. I particularly enjoyed the way in which the Minister read her Foreign Office brief, which covered a less than broad range of issues, unlike what was said by many of her colleagues.
	As many Members have said, it is not easy to get a balance between the practical objectives of a national foreign policy and human rights; indeed, the two things may sometimes be contradictory. It appears that the balance of human rights is sometimes tipped in favour of those who commit violence and deny human rights to others. Ultimately, it is the nature of democracies often to have to carry out wars against terrorists in the full glare of publicity and in the view of their own people, and sometimes they have to deny themselves the kind of actions that might be pressed on them by the military and the security forces. Sadly, as all the reports point out, there are many examples in countries throughout the world of both security forces and terrorists resorting to torture. In the past, our own country has been arraigned on that account on occasions when it has fought counter-insurgency. As a historian, the lesson that I draw is that torture is not only counter-productive but a corrosive element within any counter-insurgency forces, which invariably hands a valuable weapon to the other side, even if they are terrorists. We judge these matters through the prism of democracy: free elections, the election of democratic Governments, an independent judiciary, an independent media, political control of the armed forces and police, total transparency and adherence to international law.
	Several hon. Members rightly pointed to the role of British parliamentarians in promoting democracy. I would like to add my praise and congratulations to those at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which has played a valuable role over many years. They are frequently unsung heroes and heroines in working not only with parliamentarians and others in this country but with those in countries out in the field. The Atlantic Council of the United States, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and, of course, our own Commonwealth Parliamentary Association have all carried out a valuable role involving many parliamentarians in all parts of the House.
	Let me turn briefly to some of the interventions and speeches made during the debate. The right hon. Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George), a former Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence and a man who has carried out a vast amount of work for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, gave us a short history of parliamentary democracy in the United Kingdom. He had a cup-half-full line that we are in danger of forgetting: however much we draw up lists of countries that are failing in their progress towards democracy and human rights, many are striving towards those aims. The list he gave ranged from Albania to Tunisia. I do not know whether the Under-Secretary will respond to his comments that both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development used weasel words in their annual reports about promoting democracy, but I hope she will take them on board, and say that both Departments should be proud of raising that particular issue.

Keith Simpson: The right hon. Gentleman would undoubtedly make a good editor for a magazine. I happily take his positive intervention.
	The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), the Liberal Democrat spokesman, talked a great deal, and with much knowledge and experience, on women's rights and representation, and gave many examples at home and abroad. I said to her beforehand that I would tease her on this matter: the Conservative party may, at times, be regarded as a very conservative party, but I remind the House that 160 years ago the leader of the Conservative party became the first Jewish Prime Minister, and a quarter of a century ago we elected the first woman to be a party leader, who then became Prime Minister. As yet, the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have failed to do that. With regard to theory and practice, the Conservative party appears to be slightly ahead of those parties.
	The hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, made a wide-ranging speech on many issues, and he touched on the issue of the US Republican party's idea of a league of democracies. That was touched on by other hon. Members, and perhaps we need to look at many of our international organisations—the United Nations, NATO and others—to see whether, in the words of a former Home Secretary, they are fit for purpose, judged against the criteria laid down in the report of the hon. Member for Ilford, South, or the challenges that we will face in future.
	My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) made a robust speech, claiming that the Government were confused in their approach to democracy and human rights, and he referred to the late Robin Cook's desire to produce an ethical foreign policy in 1997. Of course, the most important point that he raised, which caused some disagreement, was that military intervention in areas involving democracy and human rights usually creates more problems than it resolves, which was touched on again almost immediately by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright).
	The hon. Gentleman quoted Sidney Webb—that will have thrown a number of colleagues who do not know who Sidney Webb was—who spoke of democracy as a way of disciplining private power. The hon. Gentleman also emphasised the importance of links between democracy and human rights, defended liberal interventionism, and said that it was through membership of organisations such as the European Union that Britain could enhance its influence. I went along with his arguments some of the way, but in practice, sadly—this is not entirely the fault of successive British Governments—the EU, when trying to get political or military forces together in providing military aid, has not been dreadfully effective to date.
	We welcomed the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) as a new Member for the Scottish National party. He made a good maiden speech, and also put forward some points relating to the debate, and we wish him well in his membership of the House. The hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) made the wonderful remark that the speech by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea had raised the level of the debate. I do not know what he meant by that, but it appeared to cause some confusion among those who had spoken previously. It was, however, meant in the most positive way, because my right hon. Friend raised an issue that we are still debating: at what stage do we use military force where there are humanitarian problems? I also recognise once again the work of the hon. Member for City of York as chairman of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. He put in a lot of hard work in that capacity.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) spoke out against the degree of extra noise in relation to the legal aspects of human rights. He has considerable experience in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. My hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) is chairman of the Conservative human rights commission, and has taken an active role on our side in pushing this agenda forward. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) spoke passionately, as usual, about the European Union and the fact that it was unaccountable. He also rightly emphasised the importance of the role of the Commonwealth, which is recognised across the Floor.
	We have ranged widely over this report on human rights. Hon. Members have spoken passionately, not least about getting the balance right between the realpolitik of foreign policy and the principles in which we believe and which we wish to push forward. There are no easy answers for any Government attempting to persuade another country—especially one with the history, the culture, the memory and the sheer size of China—that they disagree fundamentally with many of the ways in which it carries out its government and in which it protects its human rights. However, that does not stop us, as parliamentarians, putting pressure on such countries, or on our own Government.
	I want briefly to raise three aspects of the Government's report, and to highlight issues that I feel the Government need to address. The first is the issue of Burma, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who is no longer in his place, has spoken passionately. Last week, I was lucky enough to meet Andrew Kirkwood, the director of Save the Children in Burma. He has worked in that country for four years, and has led relief efforts for the charity after Cyclone Nargis. The cyclone was a terrible event and a great national disaster, but it was the total indifference and cruelty of the Burmese military that, at times, impeded the humanitarian aid and meant that tens of thousands of their own people died or suffered awfully from disease and neglect. One of the statistics that Andrew Kirkwood gave me was that something like 40 per cent. of children under the age of five in Burma die from measles, diphtheria and other such common diseases.
	I know that Burma is not the only country in which such things occur, but I want to raise with the Minister the fact that Save the Children is on the ground doing wonderful work there, at times in spite of the opposition of the senior generals. Andrew Kirkwood pointed out that, at a lower level, Save the Children is getting some degree of co-operation in Burma. He was particularly impressed by the role of the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which put an enormous amount of pressure on the Burmese regime after Cyclone Nargis.
	Our Government have agreed on the importance of the responsibility to protect in any situation in which Governments are "unable or unwilling" to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity. In relation to Burma, will the Minister update the House on what discussions have taken place at international level to move forward that concept from the theoretical to the practical? This issue was being discussed at the time, and it is of fundamental importance to all of us.
	The second issue that I wish to raise is that of Zimbabwe. Does the Minister agree that it is now high time for the international human rights observer mission to go to that country? Will she provide an update on what progress has been made to that end? It seems to all of us that Mugabe, the old crocodile, is merely playing politics again, and that we have almost gone back to square one. It is only through international pressure that we will get any shift in that area.
	The final area is Somalia. I agree with the Foreign Affairs Committee that the FCO annual report fails to pay sufficient attention to that country's severe human rights crisis. Whatever we say about Burma, Zimbabwe and—God save us—even Darfur, Somalia is one of the world's worst failed states. It is in total humanitarian crisis. Nearly half of the population, 3.25 million people, are now in need of emergency aid—a 77 per cent. increase since the beginning of this year—and 1.1 million people are displaced.
	We all recognise that trying to resolve this problem is not an easy matter, but the Foreign Affairs Committee was absolutely right to say that this is one area that really should be a major priority. At one stage Somalia was a British dependency, so if nothing else, we have a great historical link here. I would like to see Somalia as one issue that Ministers will want to take forward over the next year. When we return in a year's time to debate the next report, I hope that we will see that some progress has been made.
	Almost by chance, this has been a good debate. People on all sides have spoken with a great deal of passion. In many respects, I do not regret the Government's decision to make a statement at 8.30 this evening. I am taking advantage of my position at the Dispatch Box because this is an issue about the balance between legislation and human rights, but I personally regret having a Home Secretary preach to me and to my colleagues—many of whom have lost friends through terrorism, Minister—about being soft on terrorism. Get real!

Gillian Merron: This has been a wide-ranging, informed and often passionate debate. I would like to thank for their contributions the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington), my hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley), the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), my hon. Friends the Members for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes), the hon. Members for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson), for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) and for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), my right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, South (Mr. George) and the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind). I also congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow, East (John Mason) on his maiden speech. I recall that when I made mine, I was followed by the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk, so who knows where the hon. Gentleman might find himself one day.
	Human rights and democracy have a resonance that few other issues can match. We can all remember the image of women queuing up to vote for the first time in Afghanistan, and queues of a different nature—for food—in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. We in the UK have a mission to promote human rights and democracy not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it is in our interests. They are integral to all that we do, whether in working for peace in the middle east, in the functioning of international organisations such as the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the EU, or in our consular work, including support for the victims of forced marriage, prisoners facing execution and children illegally taken abroad by a parent.
	The promotion of democracy and human rights is integral to what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is all about and it underpins its every priority, whether in combating the global scourge of terrorism and its causes; preventing conflict and fostering its resolution; promoting a high-growth, low-carbon global economy; or strengthening institutions such as the UN, the EU and the Commonwealth, through which the international community can most effectively come together to make a difference in the world.
	In the short time available, I will endeavour to deal with some of the main themes that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe did not cover earlier. We believe that the United Nations Human Rights Council contributes to the protection and promotion of human rights globally. I would not suggest that it is a perfect institution, but some steps forward have been taken, as we have heard in our debate. The new universal periodic review process will, for the first time in the UN's history, ensure that the human rights position in every UN member country is examined on a regular basis. In addition, there will be a discussion of human rights in specific countries as a standing item on the agenda of the Human Rights Council—an item that was not on the old commission's agenda. Membership of the council depends on the votes of all UN members. While we might disagree with some members on a number of human rights issues, it is our view that continued engagement is the best way forward if we are to continue to win the arguments.
	On the UN Durban review conference and the world conference against racism, I certainly confirm our immense disagreement with the events that took place in 2001. We do not want to see a repeat of them. In particular, we condemn the featuring, which was outright, of the anti-Semitism that we heard in the NGO forum. I can tell the House that we are participating in negotiations in Geneva at the moment and that we will reassess our position when the preparatory committee ends this week.
	I share the deep concern for the prolonged suffering of the people of Zimbabwe. We want the political agreement that was reached in Harare to work. EU colleagues discussed and agreed on that early today. If there is no further progress towards a democratic resolution, we will have to consider introducing further targeted measures. To be effective, the agreement must achieve an improvement in the lives of the ordinary people of Zimbabwe and restoration of respect for human rights. With the international community, we stand ready to support the recovery of Zimbabwe and to respond to the needs of the new Government, but they must, as a Government, show themselves committed to reform, including respect for human rights.
	On Burma, which was mentioned by the hon. Members for Aylesbury, for Preseli Pembrokeshire and for Mid-Norfolk, I share the immense concern for the appalling suffering of the Burmese people, which was made yet more acute, as we have heard, by the devastating Cyclone Nargis in May. We welcome the release of several political prisoners last month, but the truth is that 2,000 remain behind bars and political freedoms are completely absent. However, let us remind ourselves that, after the cyclone, the UK was at the forefront of international efforts to convince the regime to accept international aid.
	To respond to the fair point raised by the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk, we believe that states have responsibility to provide humanitarian assistance to their populations and while the responsibility to protect applies in the context of four crimes—genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing—it does not preclude the broader responsibility of states to provide for the security and welfare of their populations.
	After the cyclone, our absolute priority was to get aid as quickly as possible to those who desperately needed it. We judged—I believe correctly, as we look back—that by working with the Association of South East Asian Nations and the UN we would manage to establish an aid delivery mechanism supported by the Burmese and that that would indeed be the most effective solution to that crisis.
	On Colombia, I refer my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South, who ably chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, to a statement made by my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary following the visit just last week of the Colombian Foreign Minister:
	"Those guilty of abuses—whoever they are—must receive justice for their actions. Colombia's people—particularly those most vulnerable: indigenous communities, the displaced, human rights defenders and trade unionists—deserve the full protection of the law, and the support of both the Colombian Government and its international partners."
	I can assure my hon. Friend that we will continue to pursue that.
	Guantanamo Bay was also raised by my hon. Friend and by the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire. I make it clear once again that the position of the Government is that that detention facility should be closed. I listened carefully to the caution counselled by my hon. Friend. We hope that the new US Administration will give fresh impetus to the wish of the US Government to reduce the number of those detained at Guantanamo Bay and to move towards closure of that detention facility.
	The hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire referred to the role of women in promoting democracy. Women are disproportionately affected by conflict, and must clearly play a role in its resolution. The United Kingdom commits itself actively to promoting the rights of women by giving them a voice, jobs, education and the right not to die in childbirth. It has supported the Afghan Government's micro-finance programme, which has given women better opportunities to secure finance to create work through creating business. In Ghana, through the efforts of civil society, it has supported demands for legislation against domestic violence, which is now in place.
	The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea got the debate going on an issue on which he feels strongly, and brought his knowledge to bear. While I respect his judgment on that issue, my view is that military intervention is not and has never been the course of first or only resort. I agree with the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) that to rule it out is to deny what may present a way forward that has eluded us through any other means, but it is not to be taken lightly; it is only one possibility.
	Let me say to my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase that I believe Iraq has come a long way. More than 12 million people voted in the 2005 election. In Afghanistan, a third of children who are involved in schools are girls, whereas previously none was. For me, that represents human rights and democracy in action.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, South has allowed me to put it on record that human rights and democracy are work in progress, whoever we are and in whatever country we are, and that includes the United Kingdom. The promotion of democracy is not just about elections, important though they are; it is about the work that we do to support the voice and the power of civil society to secure freedom of expression and to demand change. It is about building the rule of law, the accountability of the judiciary, the military and the police, and the capacity of political parties. I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for City of York in chairing the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which has done so much in that regard.
	Let me close a debate that has highlighted much of the cruelty and tragedy that happen when leadership fails by paying tribute to a document that shows leadership at its best. The universal declaration of human rights, signed almost 60 years ago, was referred to by a number of Members, including the hon. Member for Daventry. I assure him that I will take away his shopping list, and the thought with which he presented it to the House. That document is a testament to a united world, written in the aftermath of a war that ripped the world apart. It is a reminder that we can choose whether we wish to be defined by what makes us different or by what we share. It shows us what nations can achieve when we come together to assert that all people everywhere are entitled to the freedoms that many of us take for granted, and it should reinforce our determination to do more and better to ensure that it—that landmark declaration of human rights—is as powerful in practice as it is in aspiration.
	I pay tribute to the work of right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House, to non-governmental organisations and, crucially, to those individuals who take a stand for human rights in countries and conditions that would make the best of us falter. We have had a wide-ranging debate, which has been powerful, well-informed and passionate. I hope that people will take that passion from the House today, and will not keep it to themselves.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House has considered the matter of promoting democracy and human rights.

Bob Spink: Overdevelopment is the most demanding specific local issue in my constituency. It is destroying our green belt and open spaces and causing harm to the quality of life of all residents. It is putting intolerable pressure on public services and infrastructure. The blame lies jointly with the Government's building targets, local councillors and a strange acquisition with developers. We need more transparency on planning in Castle Point, and we need councillors to start to listen to residents. I congratulate Robert Kimmel and all those who by signing this excellent petition show that they care about their local community.
	The petition states:
	To the House of Commons.
	The Petition of Robert J Kimmel, residents of Castle Point and others, declares that Castle Point is already overdeveloped for the infrastructure that exists and further development should be very carefully controlled and restricted and that the proposed development of 234 Benfleet Road in Castle Point is very much against the community's interests, and offends against material planning considerations including the overdevelopment of the site, an unacceptable imposition on the established street scene, inadequate garden and parking facilities and that it will impose an unacceptable burden on the general infrastructure and public facilities such as dentists and schools. We further record that this decision is the direct responsibility of the individual councillors who should decide this matter, rather than seeking to hide behind their officers.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to make Castle Point Borough Councillors aware of this Petition and of the very deeply and widely held view of residents that Councillors should vote against this proposal.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	[P000275]

Shona McIsaac: I would like to extend my thanks to the Speaker for selecting this topic for debate.
	The issues that I wish to bring to the attention of the House relate to the deaths of Ann Mawer and Sue Barker on Christmas eve in 2007. On that Christmas eve, 52-year-old Ann Mawer went to work at Fred's Taxis in the town of Immingham. Within about 15 minutes of arriving at work, there was a horrific explosion at the taxi office, which killed both Ann and her friend and co-worker, Sue Barker. So intense was the fire that resulted from the explosion that the women had to be identified through DNA. Sue Barker's husband, who was the owner of the taxi firm, was injured in the incident.
	The deaths of those two women devastated the town of Immingham and the neighbouring village of South Killingholme. What should have been a time for families turned into a time of mourning for those communities. Hundreds of people attended the funerals of the women.
	From our investigations, it appears that a container with 25 litres of petrol had been filled up and taken into the taxi office that Christmas eve and stored under the counter where Ann and Sue worked. Either an office gas fire or an electrical appliance provided the ignition source that led to the explosion.
	Since that dreadful accident, I have been working with Ann Mawer's sisters, Sylvia Layton and Diana Ryan, to do all we can to ensure that no other person dies in such horrific circumstances. In a nutshell, the families are calling for the rules relating to fire safety to be toughened up. They also want harsher penalties for health and safety offences. They also believe that there needs to be far better training or education, so that people are aware of fire risks.
	One of the main pieces of legislation governing fire safety is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. That order brought together fire safety legislation into one document. It requires any person who exercises some level of control in premises to take reasonable steps to reduce the risk from fire and to ensure occupants can safely escape if a fire does occur. That responsible person is meant to carry out or to nominate someone to carry out a fire risk assessment, identifying all risks and hazards. They are meant to consider who may be specifically at risk. They are meant to eliminate or reduce the risk from fire as far as is reasonably practical and to provide general fire precautions to deal with any risk.
	The responsible person is meant to take additional measures to ensure fire safety where flammable or explosive materials are used or stored. They are also meant to create a plan to deal with any emergency and, in most cases, to document the findings. The guidance states that achieving fire safety is often a matter of common sense, but that the person responsible will have to ensure that sufficient time is put aside to work through the necessary steps.
	To help ensure that premises comply with the legislation, an online self-assessment form is available. I have concerns about that. I looked at that self-assessment form and it is easy to fill in, but I do not think that it does anything to make anybody aware of the risks that could be inherent in a particular workplace. Indeed, as I went through those documents, I could not see anything that appeared to prevent the storage of such an amount of flammable fuel in such a small, enclosed office space. I feel that this needs to be reviewed, and there are some questions I would like the Minister to address tonight.
	First, are the laws regarding the storage of flammable substances such as petroleum in an office workplace robust enough? Should there be, for example, a prohibition on storing large amounts of petrol in confined spaces? Also, is self-assessment always sufficient? Can small and micro-businesses have the necessary knowledge—and, indeed, time—to self-assess the risk and act accordingly? Are the guidelines as they currently exist realistically enforceable? Is it sufficient to call for the use of common sense? I am sure that everybody will agree that one person's idea of what is sensible is not necessarily the next person's idea.
	Following the inquest on 16 July this year into the deaths of Ann and Sue, the coroner, Paul Kelly, wrote to North East Lincolnshire council on 18 July. In that letter he stated:
	"A jury has recently concluded that Ann Mawer and Susan Barker died as a result of an accident following an explosion at the Immingham service station."
	That is where Fred's Taxis was located.
	"The jury expressed a view that the public should be educated/re-educated on safety issues relating to purchase and storage of petroleum spirit—especially when domestic or office storage is involved.
	Discussions with the police have resulted in a similar view being expressed.
	Without being a complete or exhaustive list, general points raised include the fact that the legislation is dense, complex, and not readily understandable even to the trained eye; there appears to be no British Standard in respect of approved containers above a certain size; there are insufficient warning signs on garage forecourts as to the dangers of domestic carriage and storage and proprietors may have become complacent in observing self-service forecourts to identify possibly risky self-service and storage behaviour."
	The council replied to the letter from Mr. Kelly on 24 July, stating that it agreed
	"that public education would be useful"
	and that it is looking to use the incident
	"as a reminder to both sellers and purchasers of the dangers associated with petroleum spirit."
	However, the council also agreed
	"that the law around petroleum containers is unclear and in that respect unhelpful."
	I certainly agree with that point.
	I have been researching this issue along with relatives of Ann Mawer, and I think that there is contradictory and conflicting guidance about containers. On one hand, I read that according to the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations 2002—DSEAR—there are no longer specific controls over the storage of petrol at workplace sites other than filling stations, yet on the other hand that workplaces need to comply with the requirements of DSEAR but do not need a licence. The legislation also seems to state—I would like the Minister to clarify these points—that workplaces no longer need to comply with regulations about containers. Yet it also states that no one should store more than 50 litres of petrol in a work room, and only then do so when it is kept in a properly labelled metal cabinet or bin with spillage retention. Some of those points appear contradictory, and I should like the Minister's Department to look into making the guidance about what is and is not allowed much clearer.
	I have also read that if a building is attached to a home or public place—I am not sure whether a taxi firm would be regarded as a public place—it is illegal to store more than 20 litres in two 10-litre metal containers. However, if plastic is used, no more than 10 litres can be stored, in two 5-litre containers. The House can see that there are several different amounts and types of container, and it is hardly surprising that people are not sure what they can and cannot do.
	I have raised the issue with representatives of Humberside fire and rescue service, who have expressed their concern to me about people's ignorance and sometimes risky behaviour as regards the storage of flammable substances. Although fire deaths are declining among the general public, deaths among firefighters are increasing. They believe that that is partly due to poorly stored flammable substances that they are not aware of. We therefore need better training and education for employers about keeping employees safe. Diana and Sylvia have called for that as well as for an examination of whether the law is sufficient to prevent such accidents from happening in future.
	Last week, on 9 October, I took Ann Mawer's sisters Diana and Sylvia to lobby the Minister responsible for health and safety, Lord McKenzie. The sisters put their case to him very powerfully and brought along a petition signed by more than 3,000 residents of the town of Immingham calling for an update in the law concerning the storage of flammable and hazardous substances in offices and workplaces. That shows the strength of feeling in our community about the loss of Ann and Sue in such tragic circumstances. Lord McKenzie indicated that he would examine the guidelines to see whether they could be updated to address our concerns. He has also agreed to meet us again when North East Lincolnshire council completes its investigation into the events of that day.
	On penalties, I understand that the Health and Safety (Offences) Bill, introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), had its Third Reading in the House of Lords on Friday and should gain Royal Assent shortly. The Bill will amend various aspects of the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 to increase the maximum fines available for health and safety offences. It will also make a prison sentence an option for most health and safety offences, whereas at the moment it is available only for certain offences. It will also mean that offences that used to be tried in lower courts can be tried in either lower or higher courts.
	As my right hon. Friend stressed when he spoke in support of those changes, there are nearly 250 work-related deaths a year in the UK, nearly 30,000 major injuries and well over 100,000 more minor injuries that keep people off work. As he put it, the Bill
	"will allow us to punish the criminally negligent who put life and limb in danger, deter those who attempt to cut costs by breaking health and safety law, and render justice faster and more efficient".—[ Official Report, 1 February 2008; Vol. 471, c. 618.]
	I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to tell me when he anticipates the Bill gaining Royal Assent and when it will come into force. If someone is charged with any health and safety breaches in relation to the deaths of Ann Mawer and Sue Barker, will they be tried under the old rules or the new? I hope that my hon. Friend and Lord McKenzie will work with Ann's family to identify where the law may be lacking and suggest changes that will increase workplace safety.
	Each April in North East Lincolnshire, there is a workers memorial day to remember those who have lost their lives in the workplace. Wreaths are laid by families and friends and by public representatives to remember those who lost their lives in Immingham, in Grimsby and in Cleethorpes. The event in our area is organised by Immingham resident and Transport and General Workers Union member Nobby Styles, who has campaigned for the event to be recognised nationally. Next year, we who lay our wreaths every year will be joined by Sylvia and Diana, who will lay a wreath in memory of their sister, Ann. The memorial plaque in Immingham where we lay our wreaths is located just yards away from where the explosion took place last Christmas eve. I hope that my hon. Friend can look seriously at the concerns raised by the whole community.